in our politics lead, an explosive new report from the new york times previewing an upcoming book and laying out the extent to which top congressional republicans initially held donald trump responsible for the january 6 attack that he incited and explores why they ultimately backed off an all-out fight with the former president. house leader kevin mccarthy reportedly told his leadership team a week before the impeachment that he planned to call trump who was still the president and tell him i think this will pass and it would be my recommendation that you should resign. joining us now, alex burn and jonathan martin, the authors of the upcoming book this will not pass, trump, biden and the battle for america s future
behind. find out where the party is going and jump in front to lead them. instead of seizing a leadership moment and drive the party, drive the caucus toward a conviction vote, instead taking the temperature of the caucus, seeing where they were at, which is there just wasn t the appetite to pursue a conviction in the senate. why not? because those rank and file senators are deferring to their voters back home, just the same as mcconnell deferred to his caucus. the sort of common thread here is a vacuum of leadership. an it s very similar to access hollywood. for a few hours, a few days in 2016 and again in january of 2021, it seemed like maybe this was the moment. once it became clear to the leaders of the gop the voters didn t care, their voters didn t care, they went back to trump. so we ll have you back when the book comes out. jonathan martin and alex burns authors of this will not pass,