- Rep. Adam Kinzinger said Donald Trump’s claims about the FBI search of his property are “under development.”
- He compared it to Trump’s shifting claims about the January 6 riots as more evidence emerged.
- Kinzinger is one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 House committee.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger said Trump’s shifting claims about the FBI’s search for his Mar-a-Lago property reflect how his account of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots changed over time — and shows that he is not telling the truth.
In an interview on CNN’s “Situation Room” Monday, Kinzinger addressed the August 8 FBI search at Trump’s Florida resort that sparked a political firestorm.
Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the House Jan. 6 committee and a longtime vocal Trump critic.
Trump initially claimed that the search for Mar-a-Lago was politically motivated and that the FBI may have even planted evidence.
But after the Justice Department on Friday unsealed the search warrant, which revealed that investigators believe he may have violated the Espionage Act, his position changed and his main defense became that he had already released the documents.
In the interview, host Wolf Blitzer asked Kinzinger about Trump’s explanation of why classified documents were found in the search, after which Kinzinger linked it to Trump’s approach through January 6.
“The statements of Donald Trump who was afraid of things were planted, to suddenly say that he just mentally declassified these things to say, well, people take work home all the time, I mean, like everything, just like Jan 6. When it started as an Antifa operation, then it was the FBI, and then it was really just a bunch of tourists, and then it was a bunch of people who were misunderstood.”
“There is always an evolving statement, but that evolving statement is always a lie, and it points to the fact that Donald Trump knew what he was doing,” Kinzinger concluded. “So I don’t know the details of the raid. But it certainly seems that Donald Trump’s explanation is wrong.”
The Justice Department and the National Archives were involved with Trump voluntarily returning a stock of 15 boxes of documents earlier in 2022.
But according to reports, officials began to believe that Trump had withheld some documents, leading them to take a more drastic approach.
The Jan. 6 commission is conducting a separate investigation into whether Trump may have broken the law by making unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Members have argued strongly that Trump is personally responsible for the violence that day by his supporters in Washington, DC, who attacked the US Capitol.
