Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) does not believe there would have been a 9/11 commission if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was the Republican leader at the time.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper mentioned the investigation surrounding 9/11, saying, “It is kind of stunning that we’re in this position where it’s now a politicized…it’s seen through the lens of politics if you want to know more about what actually happened.”
Schiff told Cooper, “That’s exactly right,” adding, “You could have made the same point after 9/11. Do we really need an investigation? Because don’t we know what happened? Don’t we know that al-Qaeda attacked us, and they used aircraft? What more is there to learn?'”
He continued, “Of course, there was a lot more to learn about why this happened and why we weren’t able to stop it.”
Watch his comments below:
This was "about a large group of people unwilling to accept the results of a democratic election, willing to use violence to have their way,” says Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, on the Jan. 6 riot.
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) July 27, 2021
“That is a very dangerous sign that our democracy is on thin ice,” he adds. pic.twitter.com/CBvPU9013H
Schiff noted, “There was some initial opposition of the Bush administration.”
He explained, “They thought the commission might report negatively on how they didn’t stop 9/11 from happening. But there were enough people of good will in both parties to overcome that and come up with a bipartisan product. But that Republican party that was willing to do that in 2001 and 2002 is not Donald Trump’s Republican party.”
Turning his attention to McCarthy, Schiff argued had he been the leader then, “There would have been no 9/11 commission. There would have been an effort to persuade the country that, what, it didn’t happen or it’s overblown or who knows what the explanation would have been.”
Schiff previously went after McCarthy after his Republican colleagues said they want to punish Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for joining the select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, as IJR reported.
“It tells you where Kevin McCarthy is and where the Republican Party is,” Schiff said during a CNN interview. “That is, that they’re an anti-truth party.”
