Kinzinger Says January 6th Panel Looking At Possible Criminal Activity By Trump

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger admitted on CNN this past weekend that the January 6th Committee is looking into whether or not Donald Trump acted "criminally" with regards to the Capitol Riot. It is not exactly clear at the moment what kind of criminal activity the committee is focusing on, but there are certainly many avenues that they could take. Farron Cousins discusses the potential charges that the committee could recommend.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

On Sunday during his state of the union show on CNN, Jake Tapper talked to Republican representative Adam Kinzinger where Tapper point blank asked Kinzinger is the January 6th select committee looking at possible criminal activity committed by Donald Trump when he was president, you know, regarding the events of January 6th, to which Kesinger replied. Yes. We're looking now Tapper then asked, you know, do you think the former president committed a crime and Kesinger then said, I'm not ready to go there yet, but I sure tell ya. I have a lot of questions about what the president was up to. Uh, and I think we will, by the end of our investigation, by the time our report is out, have a pretty good idea. He then went on to say, nobody's above the law, not even a president, former president sitting president yada yada, here's the thing. This headline came out and all day yesterday, all throughout it's making waves.

I mean, look, here's the headline from the hill king, Kinzinger says January 6th panel examining whether Trump acted criminally and it gets people riled up. See this story's actually about the media. It's not actually about what Kesinger said. It's about what the media spun it as because that headline was not just from the hill. The headline is all over the place. At least it was yesterday, Monday. And that's what people have to understand. Once you get into the heart of the story, you realize that Kens zinger is basically just talking about. Yeah, pretty much everybody that we're looking at, we're looking to see if they broke the law. That's it? That's that, that's what they're looking for because that's what they're supposed to be doing. This isn't a new revelation. This isn't Jake Tapper getting Adam Kinser to admit to, oh, they're looking at Trump for criminal activity.

They're literally looking for any criminal activity committed by any person involved in any of this. That's what this whole thing is about. And that's why headlines, like this are so infuriating for me because a lot of people don't read past the headline and that's unfortunate, but it's true. Like I get people all the time, emailing me, leaving me comments because they only read the headline and oh no, this is, yeah, you didn't watch, you didn't read the transcript. It goes in the video descriptions. But the bottom line is the committee is looking into potential criminal activity towards everyone that they're looking at. They're looking into potential criminal activity from Republican members of Congress. This is not new. Again, this is not some grand revelation that Trump could be in legal trouble. He could be in as much legal as everybody else. And the reason for that comes down to what he said that day. If you don't fight like hell, you won't have a country anymore. That's the line. That's the line that a lot of his followers who have been sentenced after their trials for participating in the riot, that's the radicalization. That is the official call to action. That's where these supporters say that he gave them permission to storm the capital. So yes, that line is important and yes, that would play a role into, you know, potential charges against Donald Trump for inciting the riot to overturn the results of the election.

But as Kinser says, we're not there yet when the final report comes out, which just so everybody knows it will not have any criminal charges in it. This is not a criminal charging body. It's an investigatory body. All they can do is recommend charges against certain individuals. It then goes to the DOJ, kind of like the, uh, contempt charges. They voted to hold this person in contempt, but then they still have to send it over to the DOJ to see if they want to take action a on it, the DOJ very well in the case of Steve Bannon. And of course, now Mark Meadows could just say, we're not doing it. Then the house is just, uh, alright, well, yeah. Okay. I guess that's it. So don't get too worked up over headlines like this. A lot of it is click bait. The, because once you get into it, you realize that Kens zinger didn't reveal anything that we didn't already know. he committee is effectively just literally doing their job OB.