During an appearance on CBS’s Face The Nation this weekend, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) — a member of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot — called for former Trump White House official Mark Meadows to be prosecuted by the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress over his refusal to cooperate with the riot panel. Kinzinger also discussed text conversations between Meadows and Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Ginni repeatedly pushed lies about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election in Meadows’s texts and called for action; in one example, Ginni told Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Asked if he felt sure that Meadows had “handed over all of his texts,” Kinzinger replied that he in fact wasn’t confident of such a thing and reiterated the committee’s commitment to pursuing the truth, explaining:
‘I’m not confident that Meadows has handed over everything at all. I mean, he was cooperating with us for a little bit, and then in an attempt to make Donald Trump happy, he stopped cooperating. We gave him plenty of space to come back, to resume that. He has not. And in fact, he’s waived executive privilege a thousand times by presenting us what he already has. So no, I’m not convinced he’s handed over everything to us. And that’s why it’s in the DOJ’s hands now whether to prosecute him for contempt. He has contempt not just for Congress — for his old institution of Congress and thereby for the American people. I hope DOJ does the right thing. And I hope we get all the information… that the American people deserve. The American people deserve these answers.’
Watch below:
“Are you confident that Meadows has handed over all of his texts?” @jdickerson asks Jan 6. committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger, on former Pres. Trump’s chief of staff.
“I’m not confident that Meadows has handed over everything at all,” Kinzinger says. pic.twitter.com/e7MDtPxmIe
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) March 27, 2022
On the specific point of text conversations between Thomas and Meadows, Kinzinger indicated that he couldn’t “confirm” or “deny” the existence of the reported conversations between the duo. The messages weren’t released by committee investigators; they emerged in media reports. Kinzinger did say, however, that panel members “have thousands of text messages from lots of people. We have a lot of documents. And we are going to, in a methodical, fact-driven way, get to the answers here. We’ll call in whoever we need to call in.” Watch those comments below:
Jan. 6 committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger would not “confirm or deny” the text messages between Ginni Thomas and ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“This is important. We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said. pic.twitter.com/kcr1YPIU1Y
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) March 27, 2022
Among the next agenda items for the riot committee are public hearings that have been in development, although exact witness lists for those remain (at least publicly) unclear. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair of the panel, also recently indicated that investigators were looking at whether “enhanced criminal penalties” covering the sorts of actions Trump took around the time of the Capitol riot should be recommended. In other words, that scenario would apparently entail the enactment of criminal penalties to try and cover for the possibility of someone perpetrating similar actions in the future. The committee is also set to vote this Monday on contempt of Congress findings implicating top Trump allies Dan Scavino, Jr. and Peter Navarro, after which point it’ll eventually be up to the full House to vote on the findings before sending them to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.
Between Election Day 2020 and January 6th, the RNC and the Trump campaign solicited donations by pushing false claims that the election was tainted by widespread fraud.
These emails encouraged supporters to put pressure on Congress to keep President Trump in power.
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) March 10, 2022