House Minority Leader McCarthy Fires Back at Pelosi After 'I Don't Hate Trump' Rant

Kevin McCarthy isn’t buying what Nancy Pelosi is selling.

Along with the rest of the country, he’s got plenty of reasons he shouldn’t.

While fielding questions from reporters Thursday, the House minority leader was asked about Pelosi’s news conference earlier in the day where she heatedly denied feeling “hate” for President Donald Trump and claimed the Democrats’ impeachment effort was motivated solely by their dedication to the Constitution.

At McCarthy’s news conference, the same reporter who sparked Pelosi’s outburst, James Rosen of Fox News, asked if McCarthy believed Pelosi’s claim.

“Do you take the speaker at her word?” Rosen asked. “Do you believe her? Do you believe she’s telling the truth when she says she does not hate the president and that’s not what this is about?”

McCarthy’s answer touched briefly on the history of the Democrats’ anti-Trump obsession, then got to Pelosi specifically.

Check it out here:

He started with a reference to Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s announcement on her first day in office that she planned to “impeach the motherf—er.”

Then he noted that Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has repeatedly lied to the American people about the president.

Back in February, Schiff claimed there was evidence “in plain sight” that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russian government (there wasn’t then, there isn’t now).

More recently, Schiff has lied about contacts between the “whistleblower” who kicked off the impeachment drive and the Intelligence Committee. He has also repeated the literally unbelievable statement that he doesn’t know the identity of the “whistleblower.”

“I’ll take them at their word when Congresswoman Tlaib said on her very first day in Congress … that she was going to impeach him,” McCarthy said.

“Or when Adam Schiff continued to lie to the American public only [to] get to the point where they are today.” 

“I’ll take the speaker at her word,” McCarthy said with understated sarcasm. “But if she paused for a moment, if she looked at just the facts, she would not have made that determination.”

McCarthy specifically cited the testimony Wednesday of George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who acknowledged that he did not vote for Trump — then blasted the Democrats’ case for impeaching him.

“I think I have a hard time believing her,” he said.

McCarthy isn’t alone, of course.

No one who has watched the behavior of Democrats in Congress since Trump took office — from the violence that marked Inauguration Day to the disgraceful campaign of lies about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the current cascade of calumny about Trump himself — can honestly think Democrats are acting out of anything but animus toward the man.

It may not be based in personality — Trump has been friendly with Democrats throughout his long public career — but it is definitely based on what he stands for.

When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the upset of the 2016 election, he upended an entire power structure in Washington, of which Nancy Pelosi was a major part and beneficiary.

Yet Pelosi claims the impeachment drive has nothing to do with politics?

It would take a fool, utterly ignorant of the events of the past three years, to take Pelosi’s words Thursday at their face value.

And McCarthy is clearly not a fool.