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The House committee investigating Jan. 6 will dig in on the financing behind the riot and present its findings in future public hearings or its final report, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said Sunday.
Asked on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” to detail some of the “missing pieces” that would be revealed in September, the lawmaker told host Chuck Todd, “I think one of the more intriguing things is going to be some of the financing.”
“The fact that a vast majority of this money was raised under ‘Stop the Steal,’ with no intention of doing anything to stop the so called stop the steal,” Kinzinger said, in reference to fundraising related to a pro-Trump rally that immediately preceded the Capitol riot. “It was all about raising money and people were abused that way.”
In its first round of public hearings this year, the committee highlighted examples of aggressive post-election funding efforts by Donald Trump’s campaign as it sought to demonstrate that the former president’s team used the race to fundraise large amounts of cash as his inner circle were unable to gather proof to support his claims of widespread voter fraud.
They raised “hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations are for the legal fight in the courts. But the Trump campaign didn’t use the money for that. The Big Lie was also a big rip off,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Cali, another panel member, has said.
Kinzinger also indicated the committee will also dig deeper into the erased Secret Service text messages.
In July, the panel subpoenaed the Secret Service over missing text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021. A letter to congressional committees, obtained by NBC News earlier this summer, showed that Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said he was informed that many of the messages had been erased “as part of a device-replacement program.”
“There’s a whole lot of we’re still sitting around like why don’t we have some of these text messages? Why was some of this stuff hidden? And I think we’ll get answers to that by the time we get— by the time we can present that to American people,” Kinzinger said Sunday.
Committee member Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., has announced another round of hearings will be held in September, and Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said that the panel’s final report could be released to the public in the same month.
Christina Zhao contributed.
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