Key January 6 member Rep. Adam Kinzinger told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Secret Service behavior around former President Donald Trump and the attack on the Capitol shows they may have a “preference for one side.”
On Monday’s edition of CNN’s The Situation Room, Blitzer asked Kinzinger about the fact that the agency had as much as two weeks advance warning about plans for violence on January 6, and the committee’s intention to recall Secret Service witnesses to clear up “inconsistencies.”
Kinzinger suggested that the problems with the Secret Service may go beyond “pure incompetence,” and could demonstrate a “preference for one side or the other”:
BLITZER: The Secret Service documents provided to your Select Committee, Congressman, show clear warnings that Trump supporters were, in fact, planning to target the U.S. Capitol.Who ultimately bears responsibility for failing to prepare for that threat?KINZINGER: Well, I think, ultimately, the responsibility, even for failing to prepare for that threat, is Donald Trump, since he created it, and then, obviously, on the day of January 6, still lit that fire.when we go down further, though, anybody, I think, that had any of this intelligence should have rang the bell loudly. Look, I was — on January 1, I remember I’m on a call with Kevin McCarthy and other Republican members. And I told — I said, look, there’s going to be violence on
the 6th. Of course, Kevin McCarthy dismissed me and thought that was overheated rhetoric.But I think let’s take — let’s take all of this information we know. We can cast some stones. We need to hold accountability. But let’s also make sure, the thing that we learned after 9/11, let’s try to learn something like that again, which is, these agencies have got to be talking to each other.One of my concerns is less about — I’m concerned that maybe they saw this intelligence that there was going to be potentially violence, that there was going to be an attack, and they dismissed it because these are Donald Trump’s people, they would never do anything like this.You have to obviously question what if, instead of that, it was replaced with, like, ISIS or extremists of some sort. So, look, we have got to protect this country for all of us. It’s the right thing to do.BLITZER: Yes, a real, real intelligence blunder. They got the intelligence. They knew what was coming, but they didn’t do anything to prepare.Your fellow committee member Zoe Lofgren says you will be calling back — you will be calling back several Secret Service agents to testify, including Tony Ornato.Based on the documents you now have from the Secret Service, Congressman, do you believe they lied in their previous testimony?KINZINGER: Well, itgets — it’s not for me to say at this point whether they lied or not. There are some inconsistencies that we’re going to pursue. There are a lot of questions, things they said earlier that maybe witnesses have countered.Look, there is something regardless. There is something going on at the Secret Service, either pure incompetence, all the way on the scale to potentially very criminal activity or — or just having a preference for one side or the other.And so we know that these text messages were deleted after these requests to preserve those documents came forward. And there’s a lot of answers we simply don’t have. They have made it clear through anonymous sources that they’re willing to come in and testify. We want to hear them again. We want to talk to them, and it’s going to be under oath.
Watch above via CNN’s The Situation Room.