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Kevin McCarthy tore into the January 6 select committee for hiring former ABC News Executive James Goldston to run their primetime hearings starting this week after he spiked a story at his former outlet the leader claims enabled sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
‘The Democrats have turned to the former ABC News exec, under whose leadership ABC spiked a story on Jeffrey Epstein, to choreograph their Jan 6 political theatre,’ McCarthy tweeted on Monday.
He also reupped an old post of his from November 2019 claiming that the then-President of ABC News was operating the network in a way that helped ‘bury the truth’ about sex offender Epstein, who died in jail in August of that year.
‘I am deeply concerned that ABC News chose to bury the truth about Jeffrey Epstein’s role in human trafficking,’ McCarthy wrote in his tweet at the time.
The GOP leader attached an image of his letter, along with then-Georgia Representative Doug Collins and Michael McCaul of Texas, ‘requesting more information about [ABC’s] enabling of Mr. Epstein.’
The Democrat-led committee hired Goldston ahead of its first primetime hearing on Thursday, a report revealed on Monday.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy tore into the January 6 select committee on Monday for hiring former ABC News executive James Goldston to produce their primetime hearings trying to peg the Capitol attack last year on Donald Trump
Goldston, McCarthy claims, during his time as ABC News’ president helped cover up a story that ‘enabled’ child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (pictured with former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell who was found guilty in 2021 of child sex trafficking)
Goldston is a former president of ABC News, but before that he ran the mammoth-sized operations at Good Morning America and Nightline as executive producer.
He’s now an adviser to the group of nine lawmakers who are set to present their case that former President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy culminated in the deadly events of January 6.
The first of six hearings will be held on Thursday at 8:00 p.m., and will reportedly focus mainly on the day-to-day events of the riot and contextualize it in Trump and his allies’ wider efforts to overturn the election.
The second will happen next Monday, starting at 10:00 a.m.
Goldston, a documentary filmmaker who now runs his own production company Aquitania Films, is shaping the explosive event to be ‘a blockbuster investigative special,’ Monday’s report states.
James Goldston is a documentary filmmaker who formerly ran the operations at Good Morning America and Nightline. He’s now reportedly helping the Democrat-led Capitol riot committee shape its evidence in the upcoming hearings
He’s aiming for a ‘raw’ presentation of evidence in an effort to give it a longer life in the news cycle and ‘so that skeptical journalists will find the material fresh.’
The former executive is also reportedly hoping to attract viewers outside of those who had already been following the committee’s investigation.
Among the tranche of evidence Goldston is working with are apparently never-before-seen White House photographs from the day of the riot as well as videotaped depositions with key witnesses.
That includes footage from Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s hours-long testimonies in front of the committee which insiders told the Washington Post will make for ‘gripping television.’
Footage from inside the Capitol that day, reportedly only a fraction of which has been made public so far, will also be shown.
The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, is beginning the first in a series of six hearings at 8pm on Thursday
McCarthy, citing video emergence, claimed back in 2019 that Goldston ‘quashed’ a report from 2016 that included a firsthand account from one of Epstein’s accusers.
The reporter who had the story, according to McCarthy’s two-year-old letter, said that when the story was killed, she was told it was a ‘stupid story’ because ‘no one knows who [Epstein] is.’
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on federal charges for sex trafficking of a minor and was found dead in his cell two months later.
Goldston announced via internal memo in late January 2021 that he was stepping down from his top post at ABC News by the end of March, just six months after former Senior Vice President for Talent and Business at ABC Barbara Fedida was ousted following accusations of ‘racial discrimination.’
The former news executive is now helping orchestrate the congressional hearings for the high-profile January 6 investigation.
A communications director for the panel did not respond to a DailyMail.com request on whether Goldston is on government payroll.
Multiple reports signal that Republicans are mounting a heavy counteroffensive to the primetime presentation.
It’s not clear if Trump will weigh in yet but both CNN and Axios have signaled that House GOP leadership including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and GOP Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik will play large roles in coordinating the response.
Meanwhile Rep. Jim Banks, chair of the Republican Study Committee, has been leading a separate investigation into the Capitol riot to address security failings that led to the violence that day.
Inside the committee room, however, reporting suggests that lawmakers are divided on what their own next steps should be.
After focusing for months on gathering and shaping evidence for the primetime hearings, the bipartisan panel is reportedly having trouble agreeing on what to do to ensure January 6 cannot happen again.
Among the ideas floated are expanding voter access via same-day registration and tightening the Insurrection Act.
Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin has reportedly been an enthusiastic supporter of abolishing the Electoral College.
Part of the evidence includes never-before-seen footage from inside the Capitol on January 6 as well as new images from the White House on that day
On the other end is committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, one of its two Republicans, and who was described to Axios as being ‘conservative’ about the reforms she would want in place.
The committee has sought to present a unified public front, though these issues are likely to surface as they get closer to releasing a final report complete with recommendations for change.
Rep. Adam Schiff, another Democrat on the panel, said Sunday that there is ‘a great deal’ the American public has not seen that will come out in the hearings.
‘Our goal is to present the narrative of what happened in this country, how close we came to losing our democracy, what led to that violent attack on the 6th? The American people, I think, know a great deal already,’ Schiff said on CBS News’ Face The Nation.
‘They’ve seen a number of bombshells already. There’s a great deal they haven’t seen.’
He added, ‘But perhaps most important is the public hasn’t seen it woven together, how one thing led to another, how one line of effort to overturn the election led to another and ultimately led to terrible violence, the first non peaceful transfer of power in our history.’
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