Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), a member of the House committee investigating last year’s Capitol violence, publicly rebutted nonsense from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Saturday after she raised the still discredited claim that Nancy Pelosi somehow had a major and primary role in the lack of National Guard preparation ahead of what turned out to be the Capitol riot.
“1,000 people have been charged for J6, with possibly 1,000’s more to be charged. Most of these people were nonviolent,” Greene posted this Saturday morning. “But Nancy Pelosi refused to bring in the National Guard ignoring Intel briefs & requests for the NG by Capitol Police and Pres Trump. Pelosi is complicit.” Just to be clear, figures from the Justice Department indicate that close to a third of those who already faced charges from the riot were accused of assaulting or impeding police, so the narrative that it was something “mostly” nonviolent doesn’t fully capture what happened. It wasn’t just a few people fighting police that day.
“Ignoring her actual role in fomenting it, she obviously didn’t read the report,” Kinzinger replied on Twitter this weekend. “Side note: The only person with the ability to deploy the DC Guard? The President and Secretary of the Army. Not the mayor, not the speaker.” Yep — Trump has repeatedly tried to pin blame on Pelosi, whether for actively blocking his deployment of the National Guard or just refusing to take the reasonable and necessary action, or whatever exactly it is that he was trying to communicate, but the Speaker of the House is not in charge of deploying the D.C. National Guard, and whoever holds the post can’t block the president from doing so. Trump, though, even brought the claim back up in some of his unsurprisingly rambling response to the recently released final report from the House riot panel.
Ignoring her actual role in fomenting it, she obviously didn’t read the report. Side note: The only person with the ability to deploy the DC Guard? The President and Secretary of the Army. Not the mayor, not the speaker. https://t.co/KcOtLzkbzH
— Adam Kinzinger #fella (@AdamKinzinger) December 24, 2022
“The highly partisan Unselect Committee Report purposely fails to mention the failure of Pelosi to heed my recommendation for troops to be used in D.C., show the “Peacefully and Patrioticly” words I used, or study the reason for the protest, Election Fraud. WITCH HUNT!” he alleged on Thursday. An official from the House, where Pelosi then served as Speaker, was on a Capitol Police board dealing with security preparations prior to January 6 — and so was an official from the Senate, where Republicans held the majority. There’s just no “there” there.
