Kevin McCarthy says Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff will be removed from House Intelligence Committee if GOP wins majority in midterms

• House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Friday threatened to boot Adam Schiff from the House Intelligence Committee.
• If the House GOP wins a majority in the midterms, McCarthy said Schiff will no longer be part of the powerful panel.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Friday said Republicans will remove Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff from the House Intelligence Committee if the GOP secures a majority in the November midterm elections.

McCarthy, the top House Republican, said during a press conference that Schiff's presence and contributions politicized the committee. Schiff currently serves as the panel's chair.

"Why is he still chair of the committee and why is he still even on the committee? In a new Congress, if it's a new majority, he will not be," McCarthy said.

"You cannot make this committee political, you cannot use it as a position of chairman to lie, and you should be focused on what the American people want you to be focused on around the world," he continued.

Schiff served largely as the ranking member of the powerful committee, which oversees the nation's intelligence agencies, during the Trump administration, where he was a vocal critic of the former Republican president and pressed for inquiries into the Trump campaign's relationship with Russia. Schiff became the committee's chair in 2019 after Democrats regained control of the House.

McCarthy has previously vowed to kick other Democrats off their committee assignments if Republicans retake the House in November. When asked to justify his reason for advocating for their removal, McCarthy said Democrats have removed Republican lawmakers from committees.

"The Democrats have created a new thing where they're picking and choosing who can be on committees," McCarthy told Breitbart. "Never in the history [of Congress] have you had the majority tell the minority who can be on [a] committee."

House Democrats last year voted to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from all her committee assignments after several news reports emerged showing the Georgia lawmaker voicing support for violence against Democrats. A Mother Jones report, for example, revealed she had served as a Facebook moderator for a group known for posting memes about executing Democratic lawmakers. She also was caught on camera harassing a survivor of the Parkland school shooting.

Democrats also removed Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, from his committee assignments after he posted an edited anime video showing him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In response, McCarthy has identified several Democratic lawmakers he wants to be removed from their committee assignments.

McCarthy, for example, expressed support for booting Rep. Eric Swalwell off of the House Intelligence Committee due to contact with a suspected Chinese spy that Swalwell disclosed to the FBI.

He's also called for Rep. Ilhan Omar to get kicked off the House Foreign Affairs panel due to past comments he characterized as "antisemitic." In 2019, Omar said she "unequivocally" apologizes for suggesting there was a connection between GOP support of Israel and campaign donations.

Insider's Brent D. Griffiths contributed to this report.