Washington DC - Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gave the Republican National Committee a surprising slap on the wrist in a rare intervention against party members who seek to defend the January 6 Capitol attack.

The GOP leader on Tuesday said it was "not the job" of the Republican National Committee to censure Rep Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House investigation into the January 6 Capitol attack, which he described as a "violent insurrection" – as opposed to the party's resolution characterizing it as "legitimate political discourse."

His blunt rebuke of the RNC's actions on Friday contrasted sharply with House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who declined to say whether he supported the move, and a fellow member of House Republican leadership who said the party acted within its rights.

The resolution's continuing reverberations laid bare the unresolved tensions within the Republican Party, between those who want to keep the focus solely on Democrats in the run-up to this year's midterm elections, and former President Donald Trump and his loyalists who are fixated on punishing his political opponents and relitigating the 2020 presidential race.

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Cheney, of Wyoming, and Kinzinger, of Illinois, especially have been targets of the former president's ire for being the only two Republicans to serve on the House committee investigating the January 6 attack, in which a mob of Trump supporters overran the US Capitol in hopes of preventing the certification of Joe Biden's victory.

The RNC censure slammed the panel as a "Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse."

Trump cheered the resolution on Friday, disparaging Cheney and Kinzinger as "RINOs," for Republicans in Name Only, and stating that "the Republican Party would be far better off without them!"

But the censure was almost immediately denounced by some Republicans as whitewashing the horrors of that day, stoking divisions within the party and distracting from the GOP's mission to make 2022 a referendum on Democratic governance.

McConnell, who gave his first remarks about the resolution on Tuesday, was pointed in describing what happened on January 6.

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"It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next," he said at his weekly Capitol Hill news conference.

He said the RNC's move to single out Cheney and Kinzinger was a break from the norm of the party not involving itself in primary fights.

"Traditionally, the view of the national party committee is that we support all members of our party, regardless of their positions on some issues," he added.

McCarthy, stopped in the Capitol hallways by a CNN reporter Tuesday, said the party resolution was not referring to those who committed violent acts. (The text of the censure has no specific denunciation of the day's violence.)

"Everybody knows anybody who broke in and caused damage that was not called for – those people, we said from the very beginning, should be in jail," McCarthy said.

"What they were talking about is the six RNC members who [the January 6 committee] subpoenaed who weren't even here, who were in Florida that day."