WARNING: This video includes strong and disturbing language and images.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., spoke on July 21 as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack presented its findings to the public. The hearing focused on what former President Donald Trump was doing during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in an effort to interrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
As rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol, Fox News host Sean Hannity, among others, texted Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to ask that Trump to make a statement or go on TV to stop the rioters. Trump’s own son, Donald Jr., asked Meadows in a text to “condemn this s**t.”
Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone listed, in recorded testimony, the number of people in the White House who wanted people to go home from the Capitol, and said he couldn’t think of anyone on staff who did not want anybody to leave the Capitol. When asked about whether Trump wanted people to leave, he consulted his lawyer, and said he couldn’t “reveal communications.”
“Although Pat Cipollone is being careful about executive privilege, there really is no ambiguity about what he said,” Kinzinger said. “Almost everybody wanted President Trump to instruct the mob to disperse. President Trump refused.”
Matthew Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, said he was hoping for something more definitive and unambiguous than the tweets Trump sent on Jan. 6, and former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, the second witness testifying at the hearing, agreed.
Kinzinger said House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy called Trump’s office to ask for Trump to make a statement. In an audio clip, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., said McCarthy had a heated exchange with Trump when the former president called the mob attacking the Capitol as “antifa.”
“Kevin responds, that ‘No, They're your people. They literally just came through my office windows and my staff are running for cover. I mean, they're running for their lives. You need to call them off,’ and the president's response to Kevin to me was chilling,” she said. “He said, ‘Well, Kevin, I guess they're just more upset about the election, you know, theft, than you are.”
In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day.
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