House Minority Leader McCarthy plans to remove Schiff from Intelligence Committee if GOP wins House

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Republicans will remove Rep. Adam Schiff from the House Intelligence Committee if the Republicans take control of the House in November, accusing the California Democrat of exploiting his chairmanship for political gain.

McCarthy cited Schiff’s comments that reports on the Hunter Biden laptop contained Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 election, noting that a recent New York Times report acknowledged that the contents on the laptop were legitimate.

“The Democrats have politicized our Intelligence Committee. You’ve watched it year after year since Adam Schiff has become the chair. No, he doesn’t warn us about Ukraine or Afghanistan or what’s happening around the world. He tells you about politics. But the worst part of it is you cannot trust what he tells you,” McCarthy told reporters on Friday.

“Two years ago, Schiff stated the emails found from Hunter Biden were all a whole smear on Joe Biden that comes from the Kremlin. That’s what the head of the Intel said. … After Schiff said this to the American public, remember the elections in November, the [former] Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said, ‘No, that’s not the case,’” McCarthy said.

He continued, “that there is no intelligence out there to base it upon, what Adam Schiff as the chair of the Intel Committee was telling the country, and what did we just find out yesterday from the New York Times? Yes, it is Joe Biden’s laptop, and yes, Adam Schiff lied to us one more time.”

McCarthy argued that Democrats should have removed Schiff from the panel in the wake of the report, asserting that the GOP plans to take action if they take back control of the chamber.

“Why is he still chair of the committee? And why is he even on the committee? In a new Congress, if it’s a new majority, he will not be,” McCarthy told reporters. “You cannot make this committee political. You cannot use it as a position of a chairman to lie, and you should be focused on what the American people want you to be focused on around the world.”

Top Republicans have been highly critical of Democrats’ decision to remove Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona from the committees’ following remarks made by the Reps.