This story apparently emanating from Rupert World (Tucker Carlson via NYPost)
McCarthy gives firm 'yes' to creating new Church Committee to investigate FBI/spy agency politicization after night of talks@RepThomasMassie, who participated in GOP speaker race talks tonight, told me he would 'love' to chair it, an idea floated last night by @TuckerCarlson pic.twitter.com/Sq8mX3KOAn
— Steven Nelson (@stevennelson10) January 5, 2023
Named after the Senate committee in the mid-1970s examining the abuses of the Cold War intelligence community after a series of revelations in the press ranging from J. Edgar Hoover's efforts to get Dr. King to commit suicide through a series of CIA assassination attempts at various international political figures to Nixon's multi-agency war on the hippies as exposed by Seymour Hersh at the end of December 1973; chaired by Frank Church (D-ID), and the direct answer of today's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The idea Tucker floated on Tuesday, along with a demand for public release of all the files collected by the January 6 Committee (what's been released already is just those referenced in the committee's report; the rest was slated to go to the National Archives, where some of them might be kept secret for up to 50 years, but McCarthy made a move, also on Tuesday, for the House to keep them instead), went like this:
To win [the 20 rebels] back, McCarthy is going to have to give them something real, not more airy promises, which he specializes in. He's going to have to give them actual concessions. If Kevin McCarthy wants to be the speaker, he is going to have to do things he would never do otherwise.
Like what?
.... Kevin McCarthy could put Thomas Massie of Kentucky in charge of a new Frank Church committee designed to discover what the FBI and the intel agencies have been doing to control domestic politics in this country. They've been doing a lot, but no one in Washington wants to talk about it. This topic is effectively off limits and has been. In fact, no one's talked about it for almost 50 years.
My first reaction is what, this is a "concession"? McCarthy was refusing to do it? I thought "investigations" of the intelligence community and its supposed persecution of Trump were already baked into the cake of a GOP majority in the House, along with "investigations" of Hunter Biden and the origins of COVID-19 and so forth. Where's the news in this story?
By the way, "Church committee" is a pretty deceptive name for it. I'm with the guy who wanted to call it the McCarthy Committee—
Tired: Army-McCarthy hearings
— Yas Time Goes By (@Yastreblyansky) January 5, 2023
Wired: FBI-McCarthy hearings
Sounds exactly right https://t.co/P9gHrnaAUk
The most immediate issue for the original Church Committee was the way the secret dark side of the Nixon administration had bent federal agencies like IRS, FBI, NSA, and CIA to operate against his perceived enemies, kind of the way we ought to be investigating the way Trump appears to have used the IRS to get intrusive audits on the taxes of Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe—the inspector general says it was a pure coincidence but doesn't respond to
recent statements by John F. Kelly, a White House chief of staff under Mr. Trump, who told The New York Times last month that Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed a desire for the I.R.S. to investigate his enemies, including Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe. Mr. Neal said he had “requested a deeper probe into the former president’s use of the I.R.S. against his political enemies” and hoped to have more from the inspector general soon.
etc., etc.
The original Army-McCarthy hearings, in contrast, were devoted to Senator McCarthy's identification of "card-carrying Communists" in the State and Defense Departments, and the Kevin McCarthy hearings will be devoted to ferreting out the
“Woke” Marxist-Maoist Cancel Culture nonsense and the weaponization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, Homeland Security, Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency to act against any American patriots who are outraged by this revolution they completely oppose, unless they are aligned with the anti-American traitors working to destroy the founding of America (thebluestateconservative)
Which leads me to noting what you've no doubt already noticed, that some of the Republican House members most ferociously opposing McCarthy are pretty much all of the members who have been suspected of criminal exposure in the Republican insurgency whose second anniversary we commemorate today: namely, Scott Perry, Andy Biggs, and Matt Gaetz, who all requested pardons (for something) from then-president Trump and blew off subpoenas from the January 6 Committee; Paul Gosar, who also asked for a pardon; Jim Jordan, deeply involved in the effort to get Pence to refuse to certify the electors, who possibly requested a pardon and definitely blew off a subpoena; and Lauren Boebert, subject of a number of January 6 mysteries from the late-night "family tour" she led through the Capitol on December 12 (the day of the Proud Boys riot in Washington some have suggested was a rehearsal for the 6th) to the strange tweet ("The Speaker has been removed from the chambers") of 2:17 PM on the 6th itself.
Well, of course Marjorie Taylor Greene also asked for a pardon, and yet she's supporting McCarthy; and McCarthy himself blew off a subpoena, but do you see what I'm suggesting? That there's a core of the rejecters—Perry, Biggs, Gaetz, Jordan, Gosar, and Boebert—who are acting in very specific fear of what the Jack Smith investigation can do to them, and what they're really looking for is some kind of immunity, which of course they don't want to say out loud.
They've broken with Trump, not just because he failed to pardon them when he had the chance, but even more because he's no longer in a position to help them (Gaetz nominating him for the Speakership is mocking him for his impotence), and they're looking for new patrons, with their antics of this week, making as much trouble as they can.
Tucker's Tuesday proposal, and McCarthy's quick positive response, are meant to assure them that they have a place un Kevin's thoughts and prayers. I don't know if they're changing their mind—today's 12th ballot has moved a lot of "holdouts" into the fold, but none of the five—but watch, as they say, this space.
Update: Gosar has switched to McCarthy in Ballot 13, and so has Jordan; the six remaining rebels voted for Jordan themselves, though.
Legit funny thoughts from born-yesterday Dan Crenshaw:
As negotiations move forward, Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who has backed McCarthy from the start, said he was frustrated by the animosity from the holdouts. “I think we could have easily gotten to that agreement in good faith, quicker,” he said, adding that McCarthy’s opponents had “no idea what they wanted.”
He thinks the world is the way the pundits say it is, where the problem is that McCarthy just isn't as "right" as the rebels and needs to haul his Overton window in their direction, even though he actually lives in that world and really ought to suspect for once that something different is going on.
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