Kevin McCarthy: House GOP agenda won't include Clinton investigation
Following Donald Trump’s Election Day win, GOP legislators in the House will no longer focus their energies on investigating Hillary Clinton, according to Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Rep. McCarthy, of California, said Sunday that instead, the Republican conference in the House would target unemployment, infrastructure, and repealing President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
“Look, I’m the majority leader, I set the agenda,” McCarthy told Fox News. “The agenda is going to be about job creation, it’s going to be about reforming and repealing Obamacare. It’s going to be on infrastructure. That’s the focus that this election was about.”
When pressed by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace about what would happen to investigating the former Democratic nominee, McCarthy replied: “I leave that portion to law enforcement. That’s just the way I do it. Keep politics out of it. Let’s create jobs in this country. That’s our agenda.”
The majority leader’s comments follow some calls from his party’s own rank-and-file members to continue probing Clinton over her private email server, an FBI investigation that was concluded earlier this summer and then briefly renewed when the agency found more Clinton-related emails on the computer of former congressman Anthony Weiner. Additionally, Trump himself promised during one of of the debates to appoint a special prosecutor for Clinton.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, pledged to press on with investigating Clinton just two days before Trump’s surprise win in the general election.
“We’re going to keep after this until we get to the truth,” Chaffetz told Fox News. “We don’t have it yet.”
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who also sits on Trump’s transition team, speculated Sunday that probes into Clinton’s time at the State Department -- including a look into the Clinton Foundation’s operations -- could be left up to the president-elect’s chosen attorney general in 2017.
“On the one hand, you don’t want to disrupt the nation with what might look like a vindictive prosecution, even though it might not be. On the other hand, you want equal justice under the law and if she has violated the law,” Giuliani told ABC News. “You know, the FBI never completed the Foundation investigation. That’s, as far as I know, that’s still an ongoing investigation. They completed the e-mail investigation, but not the Foundation investigation.”
“Exactly what you do with that, I guess the next Attorney General is going to have to figure that out. I don’t know if that will be me or not, but the next Attorney General would have to figure that out. And I’m going to make a guess, not a definitive statement, I would think if you had to make a decision like that, you’d give it -- you’d give that to an independent counsel. You wouldn’t make it as the appointee of the new president,” Giuliani said.