GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger Suspects Certain Lawmakers Knew What Was Coming On Jan. 6

"If you have members of Congress who were involved in nurturing an insurrection, heck yeah, we need to know."
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Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said he suspects that certain members of Congress were aware of what would happen at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and supported it.

“I won’t name names, but yes, I do have that suspicion,” Kinzinger, one of the sole Republicans who routinely speaks out against the insurrection and the election lies that led to it, said in an interview with the New York Times Magazine. “I will say, if you just looked at Twitter — the whole reason I brought my gun and kept my staff home and told my wife to stay in the apartment was looking at Twitter.”

He did name one name: Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), the far-right congresswoman who tweeted about the location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during the attack.

“I saw the threats,” Kinzinger told the magazine. “When Lauren Boebert — I will call her out by name — tweeted ‘Today is 1776,’ I don’t know what that meant other than this is the time for revolution.

“Maybe it was a dumb tweet that she didn’t mean. Fine. I’ll give her that credit for now. But if you have members of Congress who were involved in nurturing an insurrection, heck yeah, we need to know.”

A committee led by Democrats will press forward with an investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Senate Republicans had blocked a bill in May that would have established a bipartisan commission on the Capitol attack.

Despite his lonely public stance within the Republican conference on former President Donald Trump’s lies, Kinzinger said he thinks “the vast majority agree with my position; they just aren’t speaking out.”

He said he could understand that they were afraid to speak up, but that’s part of the job.

“If you’re scared to tell the truth to people, I understand, but you need to find a different line of work,” he said. “On something as existential as this, as threatening to the Constitution — my goodness.”

Read the full interview in the New York Times Magazine here.

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