Ex-Trump ambassador says former President ‘absolutely’ bears responsibility for January 6 riot

A former Republican senator and member of Donald Trump’s administration said Sunday that he thinks the ex-President bears some responsibility for the Capitol insurrection and that his presidency was “diminished” as a result of the deadly attack.

“Absolutely, I mean he bears responsibility. I think his presidency was diminished as a result of this, and I think he’s paying a price. He’s been impeached twice. He was impeached for those actions,” said former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who served as Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, of his former boss to CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

Brown, who said some of Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments and his response to the coronavirus pandemic “are by the wayside now” following the riot, told Bash that he supports an independent commission to investigate the events surrounding the attack.

“To have a commission like this to find out who was responsible, what went wrong, to make sure it never happens again, it should be a no-brainer,” he said.

“You look at what happened on 9/11 when we were attack by foreign terrorists and we wanted to find out immediately: where was the breakdown, what happened and why. Well, this is no different,” Brown said. “They weren’t tourists. They weren’t visiting just to have fun.”

Last week, the House passed a bill to establish a bipartisan commission to investigate the events surrounding January 6, but the legislation is likely to fail in the Senate, where few Republicans have signaled they’d vote with Democrats to support it.

Some of the GOP opposition to the commission was voiced on Sunday by Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, who said that he believes it is “too early” to establish it, adding he thinks his Republican colleagues will join him in opposing the legislation.

The senator noted in an interview with Fox News the massive ongoing federal investigation into the insurrection, saying: “That’s going to produce a lot of information eventually, but believe me, the Justice Department will not let a commission have any of that information.”