House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will meet with former President Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the former president announced in a statement.

What You Need To Know

  • House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will meet with former President Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon

  • A Republican source told CNN that the two will discuss upcoming special elections and the 2022 midterm elections

  • The meeting comes at an auspicious time for both Republicans: The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol announced it will hold its first hearing on July 27

  • McCarthy still has not announced who he will nominate to the panel; the Minority Leader can name five members to the committee

"Much to discuss!" Trump said in a release from his post-presidential office.

A Republican source told CNN that the two will discuss upcoming special elections and the 2022 midterm elections, including Democrats they believe to be vulnerable and the record-breaking $45.4 million the National Republican Congressional Committee in the second quarter of 2021, the most it has ever raised in three months in a non-election year.

But the meeting comes at an auspicious time for both Republicans: The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol announced it will hold its first hearing on July 27. McCarthy still has not announced who he will nominate to the panel.

Under the agreement creating the committee, which came about after Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would create an independent, bipartisan panel to investigate the insurrection, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., can nominate 8 members to McCarthy's five. Pelosi has already announced her picks, including Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. and Adam Schiff, D-Calif, who prosecuted Trump's second impeachment hearing, and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, an outspoken Trump critic recently removed from her No. 3 position in House GOP leadership.

"I haven’t made a decision yet, even to appoint," McCarthy recently told Fox News, adding: "I’m discussing it with my members. I have a real concern, the scope of what we’re looking at."

Pelosi, under the agreement, has the power to veto McCarthy's selections.

Trump has recently fomented conspiracy theories about the siege of the Capitol on Jan. 6 and all the “love in the air” that day, including falsely describing the circumstances of Ashli Babbitt’s death.

In comments over the past week, Trump insinuated that a Democratic partisan shot Babbitt — it was actually a Capitol Police officer defending the House chamber from attackers such as her. And Trump said Babbitt was shot in the head — in reality she was shot in the shoulder and died from the wound.

The defeated president’s comments come as he and many of his supporters recast the pro-Trump insurrection as a patriotic display of “spirit and faith and love,” as he put it Sunday on Fox News.

As thoroughly documented by video, photographs and people who were there, the attackers barged into the Capitol during hours of chaos, many of them hunting for lawmakers in hiding and for Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, who was there to certify Joe Biden’s election victory.

Trump had exhorted his followers at a staging rally to “fight like hell” to deny Biden the presidency. Five people died in the attack that followed or its aftermath, and dozens of law enforcement officers were injured.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.