Adam Schiff: Kevin McCarthy would deny 9/11 happened if he had been GOP leader in 2001

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Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., claimed Monday that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., would have denied the Sep. 11th terrorist attacks happened to prevent a commission from investigating if he were Republican leader at the time.

"Had Kevin McCarthy been the leader then, there would have been no 9/11 commission. There would have been an effort to persuade the country that it didn’t happen, or it’s overblown, or who knows what the explanation would have been," he said. 

Schiff made the brazen remark during an appearance on CNN, comparing the commission to investigate the Capitol riot events on Jan. 6 to one investigating the worst terrorist attack in American history. Numerous figures on the left have directly compared the two, outraging some of the family members of 9/11 victims.

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"You could have made the same point after 9/11: Do we really need an investigation?" Schiff said after host Anderson Cooper described the politicization of the debate surrounding the Jan. 6 commission as "stunning," and compared it to the investigation following 9/11. 

"Don’t we know what happened? Don’t we know that Al Qaeda attacked us, and they used aircraft? What more is there to learn?" Schiff asked rhetorically. "Of course, there was a lot more to learn about why this happened and why we weren’t able to stop it, and what future threat was posed by Al Qaeda, and what reforms and changes we needed to make to our intelligence collection and collaboration among agencies. And we approached that task in a bipartisan way." 

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He said former President George W. Bush's administration offered some initial opposition to the 9/11 commission, claiming they thought the commission "might report negatively on how they didn't stop 9/11 from happening." 

"There were enough people of good will in both parties to overcome that, and come up with a bipartisan product," Schiff added. "But that Republican Party that was willing to do that in 2001 and 2002 is not Donald Trump’s Republican Party."

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Schiff's comments came amid the partisan fight surrounding the commission put together by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. After opposing the formation of the commission, McCarthy selected five House Republicans to join it. Two of them, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., were rejected by Pelosi, leading McCarthy to yank his remaining choices.