President Biden’s White House is accusing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of making ‘secret agreements’ to secure his position earlier this month.
White House senior communications adviser for strategic response Andrew Bates called on McCarthy to ‘come clean’ on Tuesday. McCarthy has denied making any non-public formal agreements in exchange for favorable votes from his Republican colleagues.
‘An unprecedented tax hike on the middle class and a national abortion ban are just a glimpse of the secret, backroom deals Speaker McCarthy made with extreme MAGA members to end this month’s chaotic elections and claim the gavel,’ Bates told Politico. ‘It is well past time for Speaker McCarthy and the ultra MAGA Republican House members to come out of the dark and tell the American people, in-full, what they decided in secret.’
‘What other hidden bargains did Speaker McCarthy make behind closed doors with the most extreme, ultra MAGA members of the House Republican conference?’ he continued. ‘The American people have a right to know – now – which is why we are calling on him to make every single one of them public immediately.’
McCarthy’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Biden’s demand for transparency from McCarthy comes as Republicans on Capitol Hill are ramping up scrutiny on Biden for his mishandling of classified documents. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate the matter last week.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., also demanded that Biden release the visitor logs for his Wilmington home, where White House lawyers found a stash of classified documents. The White House Counsel’s Office says no such record exists, however, and the U.S. Secret Service has also said the detail assigned to the house did not keep a record of visitors.
‘Like every President in decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,’ White House lawyers told Fox News Digital on Monday. ‘But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitors logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration ended them.’
Biden’s accusation against McCarthy echoes language from far-left members of Congress like Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Omar accused McCarthy of conceding to ‘far-right insurrectionists’ to secure his speakership.
‘McCarthy just agreed to a deal with far right insurrectionists that would hold the entire US and global economy hostage to extreme cuts to everything from housing to education, healthcare, Social Security and Medicare,’ the Minnesota Democrat tweeted hours before McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House in one of the longest voting cycles in American history.
‘Hard to overstate how dangerous this is,’ Omar added.