Ex-GOP Rep. Justin Amash calls Kevin McCarthy 'conniving and fundamentally dishonest' after tapes reveal the House GOP leader planned to tell Trump to resign post-Jan. 6

• Ex-Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian who left the GOP, called Kevin McCarthy 'conniving' and 'dishonest.'
• Recordings reveal the top House Republican condemned Trump after January 6 in private GOP meetings.

Former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian who left the Republican Party and has become one of its most prominent critics, slammed Kevin McCarthy after new audio revealed the top House Republican excoriated Donald Trump during private calls after January 6.

McCarthy had privately placed blame for the Capitol attack squarely on Trump and told his Republican colleagues "I've had it with this guy," while at the same time publicly defending him from a second impeachment and blame for the riot.

"I met a lot of duplicitous people in Congress but none more conniving and fundamentally dishonest than Kevin McCarthy," Amash tweeted after the tapes were released. "He will say or do whatever he thinks is necessary at a particular moment to obtain or maintain power."

On Thursday, McCarthy and his staff denied that he ever said he would urge Trump to resign after the Capitol riot. In a tape of a January 10, 2021 call with Republican lawmakers released Thursday night, McCarthy said just that.

—Justin Amash (@justinamash) April 22, 2022

During his time with the GOP, Amash emerged as a rare critic of Trump within the party, and was the only Republican to say he would support a 2019 impeachment of the president.

Later that year, Amash announced he was leaving his party in a Washington Post op-ed in which he condemned America's two-party system and urged others to join him in "rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us." He left office in 2021.

Amash is once again speaking up after New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin published tapes of McCarthy's phone calls with Republican lawmakers that show a clear inconsistency between the minority leader's public and private stances on Trump.

On a January 10, 2021 call, McCarthy told House Republicans "I've had it with this guy."

"What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it," McCarthy said.

The next day, in a separate call, he assured Republicans that he had been "very clear" with Trump that the president "bears responsibility for his actions, no ifs, ands, or buts."