Rep. Adam Kinzinger said Trump’s changing claims about the FBI investigation into his Mar-a-Lago property reflect how his account of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot has changed over time — and shows that he is not telling the truth. In a nine-minute interview on CNN’s “Situation Room” Monday, Kinzinger addressed the Aug. 8 FBI investigation of Trump’s Florida resort that sparked a political firestorm. Kinzinger, who is one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 House committee and has long been a vocal critic of Trump. Trump initially argued that the Mar-a-Lago investigation was politically motivated and that the FBI might even have evidence. But after the Justice Department on Friday unsealed the warrant used in the investigation, revealing that investigators believe he may have violated the Espionage Act, his position changed and his main defense became that he had already declassified the documents. In the interview, host Wolf Blitzer asked Kinzinger about Trump’s explanation for why classified documents were found in the investigation, so Kinzinger connected it to Trump’s Jan. 6 approach. “The explanations from Donald Trump who was afraid of things planted, suddenly saying that he just, like, mentally dismissed these things saying, well, people take work at home all the time, I mean, like anything, like Jahn. 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 misunderstood people.” “There is always an evolving explanation, but that evolving explanation is always a lie and 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 appears that Donald Trump’s explanation is not accurate.” The Justice Department and the National Archives got involved with Trump voluntarily returning a stockpile of 15 boxes of documents earlier in 2022. But officials reportedly believed Trump had held back some documents, prompting them to take a more aggressive approach. The Jan. 6 panel is conducting a separate investigation into whether Trump may have broken the law by making baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Its members strongly argued that Trump is personally responsible for the violence that day by his supporters in Washington, DC, who attacked the US Capitol.
