Exclusive — Kevin McCarthy on Impeachment: Democrats Have ‘Lost Their Minds,’ Move ‘Will Backfire on them in 2020’

Alex Wong/Getty Images
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Matthew Boyle
Washington, D.C.

House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Breitbart News exclusively on Wednesday that Democrats’ decision to launch an official impeachment inquiry is proof they have “lost their minds” and expects the decision “will backfire on them in 2020” in key elections.

“The left has officially lost their minds — they are so fixated on their imaginary impeachment that they are getting nothing else done,” McCarthy said in an emailed statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News on Wednesday afternoon. “266 days in power and what have Nancy Pelosi and the Socialist Democrats accomplished? Absolutely nothing.”

McCarthy added that he sees no other outcome here other than the Democrats paying a serious political price for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to cave in to the far left of her conference and move forward on impeachment despite not having a clear reason to do so.

“America is too great to be led by a vision so small — I’m 100 percent confident Democrats obsession with impeachment will backfire on them in 2020,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy’s statement comes after Pelosi announced Tuesday that Democrats are now officially moving forward with an impeachment inquiry of President Trump, a decision she made before seeing the transcript of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump was alleged by a supposed “whistleblower” in the intelligence community to have engaged in a quid pro quo where he threatened to withhold U.S. taxpayer aid to Ukraine in exchange for forcing Ukraine into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, the one-time now-former Democrat 2020 presidential front runner.

But Trump on Wednesday released the transcript of the phone call with Zelensky, which shows there was no such quid pro quo. The transcript shows Trump did broach the subject of Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma and the former Vice President’s efforts while in office to pressure the Ukrainian government to terminate a government prosecutor investigating his son’s company. But in the transcript, the new Ukrainian president Zelensky agrees with Trump and says he is planning to investigate the Biden scandal.

Unlike Pelosi’s move to announce an impeachment push without seeing any evidence, McCarthy’s statement to Breitbart News was issued after the transcript was released publicly. It confirms previous Breitbart News reporting that Democrats are reeling and disjointed, rudderless without a clear and concise message, while Republicans are preparing for the upcoming 2020 elections in which the GOP is now clearly emboldened after the Democrats made the remarkable move to proceed with impeachment.

Privately, several aides to top Democrats on Capitol Hill expressed concerns about the lack of a focus on the impeachment move; without a clear outcome in mind, Democrats fear that whatever happens will further energize Trump ahead of the 2020 election while failing to remove him.

“If you’re going to take a shot at the king, you best not miss,” one House Democrat leadership aide told Breitbart News. “And we do not have a pathway to win without 20 GOP votes in the Senate. We are nowhere near that, not even close.”

Another senior Democrat congressional aide added regarding the move to attempt to impeach Trump: “It’s a joke. It’s all bullshit.”

Over on the Senate side, most Republicans are in line with Trump. While Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) said that he considers the transcript’s contents “troubling,” he declined to discuss “impeachment” at this time.

“The Democrats are fucked,” a senior Senate GOP aide told Breitbart News upon reviewing the transcript. “This is going to unite everyone except maybe Mitt, I bet even Ben Sasse comes around on this and backs the president unless there’s some bombshell with the whistleblower who didn’t even hear this call. Republican operatives I’ve talked to are giddy about this.”

Republican senators were publicly backing Trump by lunchtime on Wednesday:

Even Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) would not use the word “impeachment” when talking about the Democrat Party’s decision to try to take out the president of the United States.

The Senate GOP aide pointed to “deafening silence” from red state Democrat state parties, looking throughout the south and heartland noting that Democrat party officials outside D.C. are not standing with their party’s leadership in Washington now. The aide also noted that Pelosi has gotten desperate.

“She threw a Hail Mary without waiting to see the transcript,” the Senate GOP aide said. “They should have held off a few days.”

Looking across the country, Republicans nationwide are energized in candidate recruitment in battleground districts where they are seeking credible challengers to vulnerable Democrats. While some potential GOP candidates were watching and waiting on the sidelines, not sure if they would run for Congress now or wait until a future election when they think their chances might be better, at least two executive directors from state GOP committees in two 2020 battleground states with vulnerable House Democrats up for re-election have told Breitbart News in the last 24 hours there has been a surge of interest from potential credible candidates seeking to oust the Democrats from the House majority.

What’s more, candidates in battleground districts across America who are already running are emboldened. Teddy Daniels, a Republican and wounded warrior veteran running against Democrat Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA)–who just backed impeachment this week–in the deeply pro-Trump eighth district in Pennsylvania, ripped Cartwright for caving to the left while not solving problems for the constituents in his district.

“Radical leftist Matt Cartwright and the Democrats want to overturn the will of the American people who legitimately elected President Trump in 2016,” Daniels told Breitbart News in an email. “They want to use witch hunts and the impeachment process to bring about their wild and crazy socialist, anti-2nd Amendment and open borders agenda that nobody wants.”

National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesman Michael McAdams piled on Cartwright too.

“In a district President Trump won by ten points, Matt Cartwright has decided to stand with the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the socialist Democrats rather than Pennsylvania voters,” McAdams said.

Pennsylvania’s 8th congressional district is one of the 13 districts a Democrat currently represents where Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton by more than 6 percent–Trump won by 10 points there–in 2016. There are another 18 districts, for 31 total pro-Trump districts currently represented by Democrats, where Trump beat Clinton in the last election.

To retake the majority in 2020, Republicans only need to win back a net gain of 19 seats next year–and now that the Democrats have abandoned the possibility of passing any legislation whatsoever on things like infrastructure, prescription drug pricing, healthcare, the economy, jobs, guns, in favor of impeachment, Republicans feel like the Democrats have given them a messaging gift going into 2020.

McCarthy, for an hour-long exclusive interview that aired on Breitbart News radio in early August, laid out the GOP plan to retake the House majority with these 31 districts at the forefront of the effort.

“There are 31 seats that Democrats sit in today that President Trump carried,” McCarthy said. “Of those 31, 13 of them President Trump carried by more than six points. So, here you have the socialist wing of the party trying to take them further left, when the only way they have the majority is actually winning in Republican areas—areas that would be swing districts.”

Republicans were confident then, going into the August recess. But these efforts, thanks to the Democrats’ decision in the words of one GOP aide to “jump the shark completely now” with moving on impeachment proceedings, have now been supercharged this week.

In another of those 13 super pro-Trump districts that the president won by more than 6 percent, New Mexico’s second district, incumbent freshman Democrat Rep. Xochitl Torres Small (D-NM) struggled in a statement to defend her party’s move forward with an effort to impeach President Trump. In fact, the statement does not even use the word “impeachment,” even though she is now personally implicated as a Democrat member of the House majority in the effort to impeach Trump.

“Congress has a legal right to see the full details of any whistleblower complaint, especially those that involve our nation’s security,” Torres Small said. “The President must release the full complaint and allow any testimony by the whistleblower, or any other administration officials, to occur free of White House interference. Through the coming weeks and months, I will act to support and defend our Constitution by insisting on a transparent process that fully informs the American people and restores trust and faith in our system. Any threat to our national security must be taken seriously.”

In response, her Republican challengers lit into her. Yvette Herrell, the GOP candidate from the 2018 race who nearly defeated Torres Small and was leading the Democrat on election night but votes added in later swung the race the other way, told Breitbart News that Torres Small is part of a Pelosi-led coup attempt against Trump.

“Nancy Pelosi and her radical socialist allies know they can’t beat President Trump at the ballot box, so now they are trying to impeach him over a phone call they didn’t hear and haven’t seen the transcript of,” Herrell said. “I will continue to stand in strong support of our President as I have always done, and I know that everyday hardworking New Mexicans will see through this stunt for the political charade it is.”

Claire Chase, an oil and gas executive who has come under fire for previous social media posts criticizing Trump from 2015 and 2016 who now claims to support Trump, also ripped Torres Small and defended Trump on Twitter.

Even Charlie Cook, the editor of the nonpartisan rating service the Cook Political Report, tweeted out on Wednesday how bad this looks for Democrats and how it will not move voters their way:

If Republicans start banking races like these this early ahead of 2020, and putting these Democrats so far on the defensive that they need to surrender some seats in their majority, the GOP could theoretically–if it has enough quality candidates in place and structural resources built out across America–run the tables on the Democrats next year. There is a lot of time between now and then, but Democrats are clearly worried about what is happening–concerned it will backfire on them, as McCarthy is saying it will.

Democrat National Committee member from California Bob Mulholland told Politico about the impeachment push from his party’s leader from his own state: “Absent Trump being caught in a trunk with a young boy, impeachment is a political disaster for us Democrats.”

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