Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger gave a succinct response to President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that the Illinois Republican and his colleagues on the January 6 House panel should be jailed.
When asked during a wide-ranging Sunday interview on “Meet the Press” what he would do on his first day back in the White House, Trump said that each Congress member who sat on the bipartisan committee investigating the Capitol attack “should go to jail” for “what they did.” That group includes only two Republicans, Kinzinger and former Rep. Liz Cheney.
The retired Illinois congressman wrote on his Substack: “Bring it on.”
Trump’s latest threat “is nothing more than the desperate howl of a man who knows history will regard him with shame,” Kinzinger wrote Sunday. “Let me be clear: we did nothing wrong. The January 6 Committee’s work was driven by facts, the Constitution, and the pursuit of accountability — principles that seem foreign to Trump.”
“If Donald wants to pursue this vindictive fantasy, I say bring it on. I’m not intimidated by a man whose actions on January 6th showed a cowardly disregard for democracy and the rule of law,” the retired congressman continued.
In its final 2022 report, the House select committee said Trump was the “central cause” of the Capitol riot. “None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him,” the panel wrote.
Kinzinger dared Trump to “try to rewrite history” before pointing to the evidence that the panel unveiled. “Our hearings laid bare the reality: this was no spontaneous protest. It was an assault on the foundations of our democracy, encouraged and abetted by the former president himself,” he wrote.
“I’m confident that the name ‘Trump’ will be a stain on our history, and my son will be proud of what I did,” he added. “So, bring it on. We aren’t afraid of the truth, but I suspect you are.”
The January 6 committee is hardly the first group that the president-elect has threatened to throw behind bars.
Trump previously promoted a Truth Social post that suggested “televised military tribunals” for Cheney and claimed she was “guilty of treason.”
In response to his most recent threat, Cheney told The New York Times in a statement that Trump’s “suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
He has also threatened to jail journalists who refuse to identify their sources. “If the reporter doesn’t want to tell you, it’s ‘bye-bye,’ the reporter goes to jail,” Trump said in 2022 after the Supreme Court’s draft of the Dobbs opinion was leaked.
The president-elect has also threatened to prosecute President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and prominent attorneys who have been pursuing cases against him, including special counsel Jack Smith and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
