The stream of revelations from the House committee investigating the Capitol riot is picking up with the recent start of a series of public hearings planned for June. During a CBS appearance this weekend, committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) reiterated that Trump can’t escape culpability for extremist groups’ actions at the Capitol just because they happened to conduct their own planning.
Those groups — including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — acted in accordance with Trump’s own previously expressed conspiracy theories and ambitions, even if he didn’t explicitly call for precisely what happened at the Capitol. It’s not some kind of moral triumph on Trump’s part — the sheer level of Trump’s incompetence means who knows what he’d even have come up with in terms of actual plans. And after the extremists stormed the Capitol, Trump has essentially defended them, over and over and over. As Kinzinger put it:
‘The whole thing on January 6 and the violence wasn’t just about the president standing on stage, saying what he was saying. It was also about tweets… knowing darn well that he was spewing out lies before the American people… But here’s the other thing. We are inundated with people saying, this was the FBI. I mean, that you now see members of Congress again talking about the Ray Epps conspiracy, that somehow he was an informant for the FBI… it’s garbage, but that’s the kind of misinformation that’s coming back again. And by the way, John, I’ve got to tell ya: people like Ted Cruz, people like Massie, people like Sheriff Troy Nehls have been repeating this conspiracy.’
Kinzinger also addressed the question of whether then-President Trump got in touch with certain leaders to work on securing the Capitol. “I think it’s very obvious the president didn’t do anything but gleefully watch television while this was going down,” Kinzinger said on CBS. “He can say anything he wants. The real leader, the only person in charge that made those calls was Mike Pence, and we’ll prove that.” Watch Kinzinger below:
Kinzinger on January 6: "I think it is very obvious that the president didn't do anything but gleefully watch television when this was going down." pic.twitter.com/LtlodkYq2m
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 12, 2022
Over the weekend, fellow riot committee member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) went on ABC, and fellow member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) appeared on CNN. Raskin said, among other points, that the committee can prove Trump knew he hadn’t actually won the election while claiming otherwise — proof that would seemingly help firmly establish corrupt intent on the then-president’s part, which could be relevant for a hypothetical criminal case. “There’s not a specific, statutory provision for [Congress] just referring [any] crimes to the Department of Justice. I suppose our entire investigation is a referral of crimes both to the Department of Justice and to the American people,” Raskin commented.
During a hearing last Thursday, riot committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) confirmed what Kinzinger said: Trump “placed no call to any element of the U.S. government to instruct that the Capitol be defended. He did not call his Secretary of Defense on January 6th. He did not talk to his Attorney General. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day, and he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets,” according to the committee leader.
