Rep. Kevin McCarthy slams ‘totally false’ report about criticism of Trump — but doesn’t deny quote

House Minority Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., slammed a new report as “totally false,” claiming he fiercely criticized former President Trump but didn’t expressly deny the remarks in question.

On Thursday, the powerful GOP leader said that two reporters concocted a claim that he planned to tell Trump to resign after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and said, “I’ve had enough of this guy.”

“The New York Times’ reporting on me is totally false and wrong,” McCarthy said Thursday. “It comes as no surprise that the corporate media is obsessed with doing everything it can to further a liberal agenda.”

He derided the account by Timesmen Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin in a forthcoming book as a “promotional book tour.”

“The past year and a half have proven that our country was better off when President Trump was in the White House,” McCarthy added.

Even though he slammed the report, McCarthy pointedly failed to specifically deny the claims or the quotes in the report.

The reporters stood by the claims in their book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future.

“We are 1,000 percent confident in our sourcing on that comment,” Burns said.

The book says McCarthy told a House GOP leadership team phone call on Jan. 10 that he planned to directly tell Trump to step down over his incitement of the violent storming of the Capitol.

“What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it,” the report described McCarthy saying.

“It would be my recommendation you should resign,” he told the group he planned to tell Trump.

McCarthy never followed through on the promise and quickly began to mend fences with the former president.

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