Unsourced passage in Trump indictment fuels speculation about McCarthy flipping: report

A passage in the indictment against Donald Trump on allegations he tried to overturn the 2020 election has raised questions about the source of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and suggests more legal trouble could lie ahead for the former president, The Daily Beast reports.

The report notes that paragraph 115 of the indictment describes a call between Trump and Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, which occurred Jan. 6, 2021, and according to the indictment, “At 3:00 p.m., the defendant had a phone call with the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives. The defendant told the Minority Leader that the crowd at the Capitol was more upset about the election than the Minority Leader was.”

The Beast’s Jose Pagliery notes that House and Senate members had just evacuated their chambers minutes before the call between Trump and McCarthy, which was described by former Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) as damning. The report notes that Beutler suggested Trump was siding with the rioters, telling McCarthy according to published reports that they were “more upset about the election than you are.”

Pagliery notes that paragraph 115 is among just a few in which special counsel Jack Smith doesn’t provide sourcing to support his claim.

Pagliery writes for The Beast that “By choosing to speak as an omniscient narrator for that paragraph, federal prosecutors have left it entirely unclear how they know what was said on that phone call. And that’s fueling speculation about a number of possibilities: Is there a recording of the call? Did Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows—who is speculated to have been in the room with Trump at the time—provide an account to investigators? Did McCarthy?”

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