Hours after he announced his objection to forming a commission to investigate the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) defended his case in an appearance on Fox News (to the extent that host Laura Ingraham demanded a defense).
“I’ll raise a very good point of what we should be focused on,” McCarthy said. “I went to the border a couple months ago. I was told how we were catching people coming across the border, not from Central America, but from Yemen and others that were on the terrorist watch list.”
He said he was briefed by the CIA and received information that alarmed him.
“Why don’t we have a commission about that?” McCarthy continued. “Why aren’t we securing our border? That’s putting Americans at risk.”
It may be the case that McCarthy was briefed on some novel threat at the border that legitimately demands attention that it is not being paid. It is also obviously the case that the specter of terrorist infiltration over an unguarded southern border has been a long-standing bit of hand-wringing from members of McCarthy’s party and an unproven one.
