Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger on Monday suggested members of the agency charged with protecting presidents and their facilities may have engaged in misconduct in the run-up to the January 6 attack and tried to hide it afterwards.
The January 6 select committee member was speaking to CNN on The Situation Room when he told host Wolf Blazer something appears to be amiss at the US Secret Service.
Mr Kinzinger recalled a 1 January 2021 conversation with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in which he voiced concerns that there would be violence on the day Congress was set to certify Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. He said the California Republican “dismissed” him and said the threats of violence emanating from pro-Trump circles were merely “overheated rhetoric”.
The Illinois congressman said he has concerns about the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies ignoring similar reports of possible violence.
“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,” he said.
Asked about plans to recall Secret Service personnel who were close to Mr Trump before and on January 6, Mr Kinzinger said it was not his place whether to say any agents lied in prior statements to the select committee.
“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,” he said, adding that “there is something going on” at the agency.
“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,” he said.
