‘I Said Nothing of the Kind’: GOP Congressman Calls Out Fox News Report He Threatened to Resign Over McCarthy Fight

North Carolina Republican Rep. Dan Bishop was the subject of extensive tweeting on Thursday after it was reported he threatened to resign if efforts to block Rep. Kevin McCarthy from taking the Speaker’s gavel prove unsuccessful. The only hitch, he says, is that he threatened “nothing of the kind.”

Most of the Twitter reactions — which range from Women for Trump co-founder Amy Kremer calling his stand “principled courage” to conservative pundit Mark Levin‘s sarcastic mocking — shared a Fox News story originally headlined “GOP holdout Dan Bishop says he will resign if bid to stop McCarthy fails.”

One of the people sharing the Fox News tweet was Rep. Bishop. “This story is incorrect. I said nothing of the kind – I will serve my term with all the force and vigor in me,” he wrote in the quote retweet. He then replied to his tweet with a screenshot of his remarks.

What I said – pic.twitter.com/JdxrMPwgww

— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) January 5, 2023

The Fox News article attributed Bishop’s commentary to an interview with Roll Call.

Fox News originally wrote:

“We’re going to either see improvement up here the same way we made remarkable improvements in North Carolina in the state legislature, or I’m out,” Bishop told Roll Call in an interview published early Thursday morning. He said that over McCarthy’s 14-year tenure in Republican leadership, the would-be speaker has said the same things over and over again about threats facing the country and “every one of them has gotten worse, not better.”

As someone who is “older than the average bear” and “not going to stay up here for decades,” Bishop told Roll Call he has no qualms about adopting a “never Kevin” position in the ongoing leadership fight.

That Roll Call article had a softer conditional trigger for the threat of resignation, phrasing it this way:

One opponent went as far as to say he’d consider resigning if the group doesn’t succeed in changing the dysfunction that has slowly chipped power away from rank-and-file members and consolidated it in leadership.

“We’re going to either see improvement up here the same way we made remarkable improvements in North Carolina in the state legislature, or I’m out,” Dan Bishop, who hails from that state, said. He said he’s willing to make that threat because he’s “older than the average bear” and “not going to stay up here for decades.”

However, despite the attribution in the Fox News article Thursday, and lack of one in the Roll Call article also published Thursday, Mediaite found the comments first published by Danielle Battaglia of Raleigh’s News & Observer on Wednesday evening, quoting his remarks to reporters outside the House chamber after the last vote.

When asked if McHenry, who is serving as a pseudo-whip for McCarthy’s bid, has offered Bishop anything to change his vote, he said no one had.

“And I don’t want anything and I don’t need anything,” Bishop said.

Bishop said he’s amazed by those he said are in desperate search of a spot on a committee or subcommittee or in leadership.

“I don’t care about that,” Bishop said. “In fact, I’m sort of older than the average bear. I’m not old, at least I don’t think I’m old, but I’m not going to stay up here for decades. We’re going to either see improvement up here in the same way we made remarkable improvements in North Carolina, in the state legislature, or I’m out.”

The plain reading shows that Bishop was saying that he would in due time leave Congress, should there be a failure over time to produce “improvement” in D.C.

Bishop appeared on Morning Joe on Thursday to discuss why he is opposing McCarthy’s bid for speaker, who he supports for the role (Rep. Byron Donalds), and what those changes he hopes to see entail. It was also clear in that interview that he was referring to eventually leaving Congress, not resigning in the moment specifically over the McCarthy fight, as Fox News, the New York Post, and others characterized it.

In fact, Bishop said it’s a mistake to “catastrophize” the fight over the Speaker’s chair, borrowing the phrase from host Joe Scarborough.

Shortly before Mediaite contacted Fox News for comment, the headline on the article was changed to say that Bishop “denies” he claimed he’d resign, and Fox published an updated tweet.

There is a big difference between someone threatening an immediate resignation over a specific Speaker being elected, and someone saying that if things don’t change in Washington they won’t stick around forever to be a part of it.

Bishop was quoted saying the second thing, but the sensationalized rewrite is already a major topic on social media and part of the overall narrative of the Speaker fight — Fox’s non-correctional update notwithstanding.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.