House leaders worry more meetings secretly recorded
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Evan Vucci / AP
House Republican leadership is agitated after the Washington Post published a transcript from a secret recording of one of the inner-sanctum conversations in the office of Speaker Paul Ryan.
The transcript shows House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy joking with his colleagues that then-candidate Trump and California Republican Dana Rohrabacher were both on the payroll of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"The unknown is frustrating," said one senior GOP aide, referring to the possibility that this wasn't the only private leadership conversation that was secretly recorded.
Behind-the-scenes: House leadership sources have pored over the article and are privately discussing theories about where the leak came from:
- One theory — bolstered by the article's dateline ("Kiev, Ukraine") — is that the Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, or one of his associates, left behind a recording device after meeting earlier that day with Ryan.
- But of the five senior House GOP sources I've spoken to since the leak, none of them really believe that this leak came from the Ukrainians. Capitol security teams do regular sweeps of leadership offices and my sources aren't aware of recording devices being found.
- The most widespread theory in House leadership is that the secret recorder and the leaker was Evan McMullin, who as a former leadership aide participated in the June 15 conversation and confirmed the private conversation to the Washington Post. (I am told that the Post, in their back-and-forth with leadership over the story, privately said that the source wasn't McMullin. There's no evidence that he was the leaker and I've reached out to him for comment.)
- Evidence or not, leadership sources are privately worried that McMullin had a tape on while he sat silently through all of their confidential meetings. They're concerned about what leaks could come next.
