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When Adam Kinzinger came to Congress in 2011, the 32-year-old Air Force vet was considered a rising star in the GOP. Today he’s persona non grata within his own party. The Illinois lawmaker, among the few House Republicans who have been deeply critical of former President Donald Trump, is one of only two on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Over the course of eight public hearings this summer, the Jan. 6 committee has painted a devastating picture of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, leading multiple former federal prosecutors to say that the former president is at greater risk of criminal prosecution than ever before. The panel plans to continue its probe and will hold at least two new hearings in September, around the time it will release its preliminary report sharing its recommendations for how to prevent a similar event from happening in the future.
In the meantime, Kinzinger says, committee members will keep their work in front of the public by releasing videos of testimony that didn’t make it into the hearings. The panel released one such video on Monday, showing how, on the day after the attack, Trump refused to call on the Justice Department to press charges against those who stormed the Capitol.
In an interview with TIME, Kinzinger—who is not running for re-election—discusses what he thinks the committee has already accomplished and where it will go from here. These excerpts from the interview have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you think the hearings so far have been successful?
I think the hearings have been more successful than I had even hoped for, much less imagined. When you go into this, you underestimate what people don’t know. The assumption is everybody knows all the details,…
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Source : time
