Pelosi will ask anti-Trump Republican Kinzinger
to join 6 January panel
Speaker wants Illinois representative to join Liz
Cheney
Minority leader withdrew support after Trump allies
rejected
Martin
Pengelly in New York
@MartinPengelly
Sun 25 Jul
2021 16.10 BST
The speaker
of the US House, Nancy Pelosi, intends to appoint a second anti-Trump
Republican to the select committee which will investigate the deadly 6 January
assault on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.
Asked if
she would ask Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to join fellow Trump critic Liz Cheney
of Wyoming on the panel, Pelosi told ABC’s This Week: “That would be my plan.”
Asked when
the move would be formally announced, Pelosi said: “Perhaps after I speak to
Adam Kinzinger. But … that is the direction that I would be going in.”
The
committee is at the centre of high political drama. After the Republican House
minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, named Jim Jordan and Jim Banks to the panel,
both prominent allies of Donald Trump, Pelosi rejected them. McCarthy then
withdrew Republican support, leaving in place only Cheney, a pariah in her
party.
McCarthy
was widely criticised. James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist, went so
far as to call him a “pathetic glob of protoplasm”, in thrall to Trump.
Pelosi said
Kinzinger “and other Republicans have expressed an interest to serve on the
select committee. And I wanted to appoint three of them that Leader McCarthy
suggested. But he withdrew their names. The two that I would not appoint are
people who would jeopardise the integrity of the investigation, and there’s no
way I would tolerate their antics as we seek the truth.”
Asked about
Republican charges that her rejection of Jordan and Banks worsened political
divisions, Pelosi said: “This was not just any day of the week. This was a
constitutionally required day of action for Congress.
“The
Republicans will say what they will say. Our select committee will seek the
truth. It’s our patriotic duty to do so … maybe the Republicans can’t handle
the truth but we have a responsibility to seek it, to find it and in a way that
retains the confidence of the American people.”
Speaking to
Fox News Sunday, Banks, from Indiana, said: “It’s clear that Pelosi only wants
members on this committee who will stick to her talking points and stick to her
narrative. That’s why she’s picked the group that she’s already picked and
anyone that she asks to be on this committee from this point moving forward
will be stuck to her narrative, to her point of view. There won’t be another
side.”
Banks
repeatedly claimed he and Jordan were only concerned with finding out why
security failed at the Capitol on 6 January.
Congress
was attacked by Trump supporters told by the then president to “fight like
hell” to overturn his election defeat.
Later that
day, after rioters died and police officers were injured while protesters
looked for lawmakers to capture and kill, Banks and Jordan went ahead with
objections to results from Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Trump’s lie
that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud has been
repeatedly debunked and thrown out of court. On Fox News Sunday, Banks was not
asked about those claims, his support for them or how they fuelled the Capitol
attack.
Elsewhere,
a Republican senator who voted to impeach Trump over the Capitol attack and
also backed an independent commission to investigate it repeated the talking
point followed by Banks: that Democrats want the House committee to “drive a
political message”.
“I think
people do want to get to the bottom of [6 January],” Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania
told CNN’s State of the Union.
“Yes, I did
support the Senate version of a commission that would have been genuinely and
truly bipartisan both in its composition of members, and in staff, which I
think is important.”
Republicans
in the Senate blocked that.
But, “this
exercise in the House was not meant to be that … we have a lot of
investigations under way now, there are Senate committees that have completed,
there are others still in progress, we have many criminal investigations.
“I would
favour a truly bipartisan commission. But I think that we should be candid about
the fact that it is politically to the advantage of Democrats to try to keep
this issue in the forefront. James Carville has been very candid about this,
he’s urged the Democrats, ‘Don’t let the election be about Joe Biden and his
policies in 2022, make that [midterm] election about 6 January and Donald
Trump.
“And so
it’s very clear that Democrats have an incentive to try to drive a political
message here, and a purely partisan commission in the House is probably going
to do that.”
Speaking on
MSNBC this week, Carville said McCarthy, “the pathetic glob of protoplasm, he
was panicked out of his mind on 6 January calling the president, begging for
help. He refuses to have the bipartisan committee, now he’s doing this. The guy
has no sense of shame.”
Toomey was
asked if Republicans refusing to support a committee to investigate the actions
of supporters of a Republican president might reflect badly on the party.
“No,” he
said, “I think it is it is constant reminder about a terrible episode in our
history, which Donald Trump was at the heart of, rather than looking at the
policies of the current president which is more relevant in 2022, I would argue
… and the damage that he’s going to be doing.
“That’s
what we should be debating in 2022. But, you know, I’m not sure that’s what the
Democrats want to be talking about.”
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