Kinzinger Undermines the January 6 Committee

A mateur hour continues.

My Friday column was about the pushback against former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the House January 6 committee. Hutchinson testified (among many other things) that Agent Tony Ornato of the Secret Service, who ran security at the Trump White House, told her that President Trump had gotten into a minor physical altercation with the head of his personal security detail, Agent Bobby Engel.

As everyone by now has heard the story, Trump was said to be furious that the agents would not take him to the Capitol after his fiery Ellipse speech, and to have grabbed the steering wheel of the Secret Service SUV. Engel is said to have put his hand on Trump’s arm to stop him, whereupon Trump is described as lunging at Engel’s clavicle area with his free hand. Importantly, Hutchinson did not claim to have seen this happen. She testified that she was briefed on it by Ornato, in the presence of Engel, who was paying attention and appeared to be in agreement with Ornato’s rendition of the story (at least he didn’t object to anything, according to Hutchinson).

Since Tuesday’s testimony, a source said to be close to Ornato has said Ornato claims to be shocked by Hutchinson’s testimony and is willing to testify under oath that he never told her any such thing. Sources also say Engel and the (unidentified) Secret Service agent who was driving the SUV both denied Hutchinson’s account about what happened in the car — it is not clear to me whether Engel is denying Hutchinson’s testimony that Ornato told the story to her in Engel’s presence.

It is further reported that both Ornato and Engel had been deposed by the committee sometime before Hutchinson’s public testimony this week. We don’t know what they were asked or what they stated — which is why I’ve argued that the committee, whose dodgy practice of selectively publicizing testimony seems to have caused this controversy, should release the relevant portions of their behind-closed-doors testimony.

Since then, a member of the committee, Representative Adam Kinzinger, somehow thought it would be helpful to . . . yes . . . brand Ornato a liar on Twitter.

Adam Kinzinger of Illinois was a courageous combat pilot. This should be his calling card, but he is best known, instead, for being an ardently anti-Trump Republican because he can’t seem to get a sentence out without reminding people. (Memo to Adam: We got it.) He is retiring this year because he had scant hope of being reelected. Though the former president likes to claim credit for the political misfortunes of his nemeses, Kinzinger’s had more to do with redistricting.

The background here is that some allies of Hutchinson have been pushing back against the reports about Ornato’s rebuke of Hutchinson. These include Olivia Troye, an adviser to Vice President Pence. She tweeted a passage from a Trump book (I Alone Can Fix It, by Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker) in which it is reported that, during the riot, Ornato told retired general Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national-security adviser, that the Secret Service was planning to move Pence from the Capitol to Joint Base Andrews. Kellogg is said to have told Ornato he couldn’t do that, in a manner that implied Ornato and the Secret Service were on board with Trump’s “stop the steal” gambit to prevent Pence from counting state-certified electoral votes: “Leave him where he’s at, he’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”

The book excerpt goes on to say, “Ornato, through a spokesman, denied having this conversation.” (Aside: Troye and General Kellogg have reportedly had a hostile relationship in the past; it’s not clear if that factors into this saga.)

Troye’s tweet was retweeted by Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former Trump White House communications director. She had also served as Pence’s press secretary, and resigned from the administration in December 2020 — before condemning Trump for the Capitol riot and joining CNN as a commentator. Griffin also chimed in with her own brief Ornato story, this one regarding a raucous protest in Washington following George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police:

Tony Ornato lied about me too. During the protests at Lafayette sq in 2020, I told Mark Meadows & Ornato they needed to warn press staged there before clearing the square. Meadows replied: “we aren’t doing that.” Tony later lied & said the exchange never happened. He knows it did.

We should note that, by her own account, it was Griffin who put Hutchinson in contact with January 6 committee vice-chairwoman Liz Cheney.

Upon seeing this free-for-all, Kinzinger couldn’t help himself. He retweeted Griffin, adding his own snark: “There seems to be a major thread here . . . Tony Ornato likes to lie.”

One is left to wonder if Kinzinger grasps how half-witted this was. There are manifest reasons for questioning Ornato’s reported comments about Hutchinson, but even more obvious reasons why he’s got no business being the one to do it on friggin’ Twitter.

To begin with, the reported “source close to Ornato” who reported his position regarding Hutchinson is unidentified and unsworn. Moreover, there is no obvious reason why Hutchinson would lie to the committee about something she acknowledged only hearing about, not seeing, while simultaneously pointing the committee to two people (Ornato and Engel) who were in a position to expose her if she wasn’t telling the truth. If she were inclined to lie about the former president, she could easily have made up something crazy that she had supposedly seen in the West Wing, and that only Trump (who is highly unlikely to testify) was in a position to refute. Instead, with respect to everything of importance she told the committee, she included people who were there and whom, for all she knows, the committee can interview.

As I noted in Friday’s column, it is one thing to claim that Hutchinson is wrong about an incident she acknowledges she did not witness firsthand. It would be something far more serious, though, if she were wrong (or worse, lying) when she said Ornato told her about the alleged SUV incident. Since this would be a peculiar thing for her to have made up out of whole cloth, the prudence of maintaining healthy skepticism about any outright denial by Ornato is obvious.

Beyond that, the Twitter pile-on shows that there are plenty of reasons to question Ornato’s credibility. To be clear, nothing that has been said about him means he was lying in the past, or is lying now. That’s what we have official proceedings for: real hearings in which witnesses testify under oath and get cross-examined, and we get to assess their demeanor and how their version of events stacks up against other evidence and testimony.

And, to state the glaringly obvious, what we really need for that is — all together now! — credible official proceedings. You know, the kind where fact finders project seriousness and enough detachment from the fray that we can presume, if not objectivity (this is Congress after all), then at least that witnesses will be treated fairly.

What Kinzinger instead demonstrates is that he’d rather be one of the mud-wrestlers than the referee.

Does he not get that the January 6 committee is already on thin ice from a public-acceptance standpoint? The vast majority of the country is not obsessed with Donald Trump and figures it already knows quite enough about a disgraceful riot that happened a year and a half ago. Kinzinger’s potential audience is the remainder. Of these, many who might have been curious have tuned the committee out completely because it’s too partisan. Most others — the people who may be trying to give the committee a chance despite its obvious flaws — are weighing whether they can trust the members of the committee to run as “professional” an investigation as they repeatedly vowed they would do?

I’m entirely open to the possibility that Hutchinson’s account will prove more trustworthy than Ornato’s. But I bet I am like most people who are paying attention in that I am never going to get there unless I’m convinced Ornato got a fair shake.

Why should I think Kinzinger is going to give him a fair shake?

Kinzinger could do some good, in his public commentary outside the committee setting, if he would share with us, say, what Ornato and Engel said about the SUV incident when the committee interviewed them. Or whether the committee asked them about it — and if not, why not. Or whether the committee tried to corroborate Hutchinson by interviewing Ornato and Engel again before eliciting Hutchinson’s hearsay account of a controversial incident on national television. Or whether the committee realized, when it elicited Hutchinson’s testimony that she had written a note the committee hyped at the hearing, that associate White House counsel Eric Herschmann had already told the committee he was the one who wrote the note.

Those kinds of things could be constructive coming from a committee member trying to help the public sort matters out. Adding to the reasons for people to be skeptical, and making fools out of people who’ve urged that the committee merits our attention despite its flaws, is the opposite of constructive.