Adam Kinzinger, who recently left office as a Republican Congressman from Illinois and will now be providing commentary on CNN, in addition to his outside political advocacy, denounced House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy as a “piece of shit” in a recently conducted conservative podcast interview.
Kinzinger shared his assessment in a discussion about George Santos, the first-term GOP Congressman from New York who has been caught lying about a just staggering array of topics — and is facing questions about the legality of his finances. A recent complaint sought a federal probe into issues like Santos campaign money apparently going towards rent at his own residence. “Kevin’s a piece of shit,” Kinzinger told host Charlie Sykes. “And let’s just be honest about this, because he will say whatever he needs to say to stay in power. I’m not even saying that gratuitously to be mean to him. It’s just a fact.” McCarthy doesn’t sound particularly concerned about Santos, instead proving generally accepting.
Kinzinger subsequently brought up the new House Speaker’s well-documented ambitions to keep prominent Dems, including Adam Schiff, off key panels in the House. The former Congressman noted how support for past initiatives restricting House Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees was bipartisan.
Listen below:
"Kevin's a piece of shit. And let's just be honest about this, because he will say whatever you need to say to stay in power." — @AdamKinzinger
"I'm not even saying that gratuitously to be mean to him. It's just a fact."
Listen to the whole thing here: https://t.co/jQhbh1IrtR pic.twitter.com/Pp5x1Qy9T1— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) January 12, 2023
Kinzinger further noted that exaggerating portions of your resume is different from “making up a whole new life,” as it appears Santos generally did. The new Congressman even insisted that he descended from grandparents who survived the Holocaust, but there’s apparently no evidence these forebears of his were even born in Europe. In Nassau County, which is on New York’s Long Island, where Santos’s district sits, the county GOP chair recently recalled to reporters that Santos claimed to him he played on a volleyball team at Baruch College, where — evidently with Santos’s claimed involvement — the team won a league championship. Santos never went to that college at all. The GOP official providing this account, details of which he said were the best he could recall, pushed in recent days for Santos to resign, which he’s predictably refused.
Elsewhere, McCarthy is settling into a new role as Speaker in which it’s unclear he’ll get much of anything done in terms of original policy for the next two years. An early bill the new Republican majority in the House passed would strip additional funding for the IRS, imperiling the agency’s ability to keep up with taxpayers’ everyday needs for assistance and to go after wealthy tax evaders. The measure currently has no chance of becoming law.
