Exclusive ? McCarthy Plans to Strip Omar off Foreign Affairs; Swalwell, Schiff off Intel Committee

Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) of their assignments on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her committee assignment on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.McCarthy also said Swalwell would not be allowed to serve on the Homeland Security Committee either. McCarthy’s comments came during the latest On The Hill long-form video special, taped in December at an Eastern Market establishment on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.“The Democrats have created a new thing where they’re picking and choosing who can be on committees,” McCarthy said. “This is a new level of what the Democrats have done.”In addition, he said he will pull Schiff—the current HPSCI chairman—off the Intelligence Committee.“You look at Adam Schiff—he should not be serving on Intel when he has openly, knowingly now used a fake dossier, lied to the American public in the process and doesn’t have any ill will [and] says he wants to continue to do it,” McCarthy said. (Shawn Thew – Pool/Getty Images)McCarthy’s pledge to reform the Intelligence Committee and remove problematic Democrats like Schiff and Swalwell comes as the committee’s longtime Republican lead—onetime chairman and then ranking member now former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA)—left Congress to head up former President Donald Trump’s new social media venture. In this interview, taped in the immediate aftermath of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) fending off Democrat efforts to remove her from committees as well over a crude joke she made about Omar, McCarthy explained how he deals with it.“The people that are causing this problem are not in the Republican conference,” McCarthy said. Scott Applewhite/AP, Drew Angerer/Getty)To bolster his case that the media drives much of this to divide Republicans, McCarthy pointed to how during that same week Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) falsely called McCarthy the leader of the “Ku Klux Klan conference”—and that nobody asked Pelosi about that false smear during her press conference that week.“In that same week [as the Boebert/Omar controversy],” McCarthy said, “you had a member of the Democratic Party saying I was working with the Ku Klux Klan but no media asked Pelosi about that. Let’s focus on this election.”McCarthy has had a much different approach to dealing with members across the conference and in particular the House Freedom Caucus than his predecessors former Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner.“Because I’m a conservative,” McCarthy said when asked about it, before explaining how he will manage things differently than they did moving forward.House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Speaker Paul Ryan walk to a press conference on Capitol Hill, November 29, 2017, in Washington, DC. Let’s not take the bait, let’s focus on the American public, and work together to make that happen.”On that note, too, McCarthy also promised that committee assignments will be made on merit alone and that membership in the Freedom Caucus or any other group will not preclude anyone from serving on key committees—a departure from how Boehner and Ryan managed such matters in the past.“For the insiders, yeah, what people probably felt in the past ‘oh, well if I had some belief, I couldn’t be on some committees.’ Under my leadership, that’s never been the case,” McCarthy said.