'Don't fall for it': Ex-GOP lawmaker exposes a 'cheap magic trick' targeting Trump enemies

Adam Kinzinger exposed the "cheap magic trick" right-wing media figures are pulling to hype up an alleged conspiracy against President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies.

Scandal-plagued reporter John Solomon claims to have blown the lid off evidence of wrongdoing by the House select committee during its investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection, but former Republican panelist Adam Kinzinger wrote on his Substack page that those allegations are misleading repackaging of long-public information.

"When John Solomon claims he just 'discovered' that the January 6th Committee obtained phone metadata, don’t fall for it," Kinzinger wrote. "What he’s doing is what the right-wing outrage industry does best: take something ordinary, long-public, and fully explained — and repackage it as a 'bombshell' scandal for a new audience that doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, that it’s old news."

Fox News contacted the former GOP lawmaker for comment on reporting from Solomon, whose work was a central part of the Ukraine scheme that got Trump impeached the first time, but Kinzinger pointed out the conservative media outlet was among the many that reported on the committee's work now being repackaged as new and damaging information.

"Here’s what really happened," Kinzinger wrote. "In 2021, the Jan. 6 Select Committee subpoenaed telecom and tech companies for phone metadata — the basic call logs that show who called whom, when, and for how long. No wiretaps. No recordings. Just routine investigative work. These subpoenas were announced publicly, covered by every major outlet, and later detailed by Denver Riggleman, the committee’s technical adviser, in his book The Breach and in a 60 Minutes interview."

"Solomon, years later, pretends to have stumbled upon this information — as if the committee’s data collection was a secret 'surveillance' operation," Kinzinger wrote. "And now he’s spinning the idea that members of Congress somehow conspired with 'Trump’s FBI' (yes Trump was still President) to create January 6 or to spy on Americans afterward. It’s nonsense. Worse than nonsense, it’s deliberate distortion."

Kinzinger explained how the "scandal machine" works to gin up fake outrage for "the angry and uninformed" by labeling routine actions as outrageous, collapsing timelines and deliberately conflating events to imply shadowy machinations, and then trotting out old news as "bombshell" discoveries.

"By claiming to 'discover' what was publicly reported three years ago, they get to play both whistleblower and victim," he wrote. "The goal isn’t truth; it’s attention ... Once the narrative catches fire on social media, on talk radio, or on certain cable shows, facts no longer matter. What matters is the emotional payoff — the feeling that 'they' are always after 'us.'"

Kinzinger pointed out that Solomon's employers at The Hill and Fox News reviewed his work and found it lacking credibility, and he reportedly participated in Rudy Giuliani's disinformation network in Ukraine.

"This latest stunt fits the pattern perfectly: take something legitimate, strip it of context, and sell it as corruption," Kinzinger wrote. "What Solomon and his ecosystem are doing is retroactive alchemy — turning public facts into fresh outrage for a new audience. And like all cheap magic tricks, it only works if you don’t look too closely."