The House speaker, Kevin
McCarthy, has had his hands on the gavel
for just over two weeks now.
And if you're a person in power,
you better believe your expert,
your expert
fact checker
Daniel Day-Lewis is watching you
Daniel, good morning.
You found some McCarthy's
claims misleading
and some are just plain wrong.
So let's start with the speaker
using Nancy Pelosi's
name to defend his position
on the debt ceiling.
Listen.
When
Trump was president and Nancy
Pelosi was speaker,
they became a debt ceiling agree
and it was a cap agreement for t
to cap the spending
and make those decisions.
Daniel, what did you find?
Don, this stuff is highly mislea
McCarthy is trying to say, look,
why is it crazy for us
Republicans to impose a spending
Nancy Pelosi Democrat
did a spending cap in 2019
but that is not actually what ha
What this 2019 Pelosi deal
actually did was loosen soften r
a preexisting spending cap
that was already in effect
because of a 2011
law known as the budget Control
So Pelosi
got the government
to spend tens of billions
of additional dollars
over and above the cap
that was already in place at the
And her deal ensured
that these discretionary spendin
would expire after 2021
so that Pelosi the example is no
the same as what McCarthy
and the conservatives in his cau
are now talking about
which is cut government spending
by creating a new spending cap.
In fact on
I think it's basically the oppos
Dana we've also been hearing
Speaker McCarthy
repeat the Republican talking po
about getting rid of tens of tho
IRS agents. Listen to this.
We put out a commitment to Ameri
to tell them exactly what we wou
if they gave us the power.
And in this first week,
we continue to keep that commitm
we repealed 87,000 IRS agents.
Is that accurate?
John McCarthy is wrong in two wa
First of all, House Republicans
didn't actually repeal anything.
They did vote to repeal.
They passed a bill to repeal it.
More than 70 billion in new IRS
But that bill is not
going to get through the Senate
or President Biden.
So they have not changed the law
Second of all, this frequent Rep
talking point
you hear about how Democrats are
87,000 new IRS agents is just no
It's an exaggeration.
The Inflation Reduction Act
that Biden signed into law last
includes 80 billion
in additional funding for the IR
That will very possibly
allow the IRS
to hire
tens of thousands
of additional employees.
But not even close
to all these employees,
Don, will be agents.
The people who conduct audits
and investigations
sometimes frighten people,
not agents,
make up the vast
majority of the IRS workforce,
and many of the newly hired empl
we know
will be in things like customer
and operations in it.
And experts
tell us
that many of the new hires
will be making up
for attrition, filling posts
left by tens of thousands
of retirements, departures,
not taking newly created jobs.
So the image McCarthy
and other Republicans
are trying to conjure Dawn
of this army of 87,000
new agents coming to get you
is not based on the facts.
McCarthy also echoing
Trump's claim
that federal law enforcement
was wrong
for executing a search warrant a
a Lago resort,
something
the FBI says resulted in the rec
of more than 100 government docu
marked as classified and hundred
of other government documents as
Is this claim true, Daniel?
We know it's
not true,
Don, that the government
could have just come tomorrow lo
at any time, as McCarthy says,
without executing a formal searc
and gotten
all the government documents the
The Feds first, the National Arc
then DOJ
had been trying for more than a
at the time of the August search
to get government records back f
without a warrant. It did not wo
We know that the Trump team didn
even give back all the records
more classified
after DOJ went beyond
asking and issued a subpoena
for them in May.
The Trump team hadn't even given
all records back at the time.
A Trump lawyer
signed a certification in June
saying they had been given back,
and there was actually a day, Ju
where reps from the FBI and DOJ
went to Mar a Lago
without a search warrant.
What happened?
Well, according to a DOJ court f
and I quote, the former president's co
explicitly prohibited
government personnel
from opening
or looking inside any of the box
that remained in the storage roo
giving no opportunity
for the government to confirm
that no documents with classific
markings remained
So McCarthy claims that they cou
just come
and gotten these documents in Ma
without a warrant.
Well, they were there.
They weren't
even allowed to look, let alone
take anything done.
Daniel Dale, you're going to be
in the coming weeks and months a
Thank you very much.
Appreciate that, Poppy.