I watched virtually every minute of Day Five of the House select committee’s televised hearing on the 1/6 insurrection, but one image from my day in front of the TV stands out.
U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., was questioning the Justice Department officials summoned to testify. The discussion turned to a Defense Department request made in early January 2021 to examine whether an Italian firm was able to change ballots cast for Donald Trump into votes for Joe Biden.
The look on Kinzinger’s face as he was grilling the witnesses was, to say the least, most edifying. It was as if he couldn’t believe (a) that he was asking such a question and (b) that the Defense Department was actually exerting any effort to uncover such nonsense.
The request reportedly came from Donald J. Trump. Yep, the POTUS himself wanted to know whether DOD could determine whether there were any Internet spooks monkeying around with the returns.
I mention this for an important reason.
It is that at no time during the frontal attack on the Capitol on 1/6 did Donald Trump bother to call the Defense Department to deploy troops to quell the violence that killed several police officers and injured dozens of others.
Oh, no! He was fixated on an election he lost to Joe Biden … which lends some authenticity to Rep. Kinzinger’s apparent disbelief in the testimony he received from the DOJ officials sitting before the committee.