Steve Schmidt slams Kevin McCarthy's 'sickness and perfidy'

On Friday, former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt took to Twitter to shred House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), recounting his personal experiences dealing with him and painting him as craven and weak.

This came in response to a letter from House Republicans highlighted by McCarthy earlier in the day, demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray appear before Republicans on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees to submit to interrogation about the FBI search of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

"It is hard to contemplate the sickness and perfidy involved here by one of America’s greatest chaos agents, extremists and liars," wrote Schmidt. "McCarthy claimed to speak for millions the other day. Nonsense. He represents Bakersfield. He serves Trump on his knees like a servant. MAGA is an extremist movement that has occupied the institutions of the Republican Party completely which exaggerated its strength. Millions of Republicans will join Democrats to stop MAGA violence, lies, control, extremism and religious fanaticism. McCarthy will never be Speaker."

Schmidt then recounted how McCarthy sought help from him back in 2015 when he was next in line to be Speaker, only to be derailed by faction-fighting from the right and a scandal in which he was caught openly boasting he used congressional investigative resources to injure Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

"When Kevin McCarthy’s last Speakership was falling apart with whiffs of scandal and the smoke of seemy and steamy recriminations rising from the Republican Conference guess who he called to help sort through the cluster of his life?" continued Schmidt. "It was dark out when the old elevator creaked open. The Brown Palace was an unlikely place for a political meeting with a California politician. I knocked on the door. The man who opened it looked sad. He was wearing boxers and a t shirt. It was Kevin McCarthy. His Speakership was going up in smoke. He wanted to know what to do."

Schmidt teased that he would be revealing more embarrassing information about McCarthy in due course: "Stay tuned for an all time great political story about the man who betrayed America for Donald Trump. This unfit man ... is a hustler and an extremist who is trying to end the American experiment. He’s a bad guy."

This comes amid a new round of doubts about whether Republicans can win anything other than a narrow House majority as Democratic numbers rebound, raising the possibility that once again, McCarthy could lack a majority of votes to become Speaker even if Republicans win in November.