June 12, 2022

Adam Kinzinger joined CBS' Face The Nation on Sunday morning to discuss the bombshell revelations from the first public hearing held by the bipartisan January 6th Committee and he had some pretty stark words for Donald Trump and his supporters.

DICKERSON: One of the findings on Thursday even, we were shown for the first time, is several people close the President telling him there was no widespread fraud, he was going to lose. How many people close to him do you think were sending him that message?

KINZINGER: I don't really know many people around him that truly believe that the election was stolen and they told him so. Yet a lot of people told him it wasn't.

DICKERSON: Were there people who knew it was a lie and yet carried on in his inner circle?

KINZINGER: Oh, for sure. All you have to do is look at he was surrounded by "yes people" that want to tell him everything that pleases him. We'll get more into at. I don't want to spoil the deep dive into some of this stuff. I think if anybody truly believed, after what you see, after what the Attorney General says, for instance, after what every piece of information comes in, if you truly believe the election was stolen then, if the President truly believes it, for instance, he is not mentally capable to be President. I think he didn't believe it. I think the people around him didn't believe it. This was all about keeping power against the will of the American people.

This is a KEY point for the committee to make, in fact it may be the biggest one, from a legal standpoint. If they can show that he KNEW he lost and that he continued to push the big lie to his followers in order to incite them to commit insurrection and to riot against the Capitol, that is something that cannot be overlooked by the Department of Justice. It is one thing for him to genuinely believe he won - not that he SHOULD have won - but that he really did win and no one told him that he lost. It is becoming crystal clear that pretty everyone told him he lost (Bill Barr, Jason Miller, even Ivanka!). Let's see what happens in subsequent hearings when they keep pulling this thread.

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