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“On Jan. 6, for the first time since I was the National Security Advisor on Sept. 11, I cried that day. I thought, ‘I study countries that do this.’ I didn’t think it would happen in my own country, so it was a terrible moment.”
That was former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice while guest co-hosting “The View” on Wednesday.
Her comments came as the hosts discussed the House committee that is tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. The committee voted unanimously Tuesday to hold former White House aide Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress after he defied a subpoena for documents and testimony.
Rice made clear she believed the events of Jan. 6 were “wrong.”
“I called it an assault on law and order and an assault on our democratic processes. So full stop, it was wrong,” she said.
The panel of hosts also discussed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comments that the GOP should be looking to “the future and not the past.”
“I think what Sen. McConnell may be referencing is, yes it’s time to move on in a lot of ways,” Rice said. “I’m one who believes that the American people are now concerned about their, what we call ‘kitchen table issues’ — the price of gasoline, inflation, what’s happening to kids in school.”
Host Sunny Hostin pushed back, saying that “past will become prologue if we don’t find out exactly what happened Jan. 6.”
Rice countered, saying “we will find out” what happened that day, and that “our institutions have to be upheld.”
“I also know that as a government and as a country, we’ve got to be concerned about the things that are making life hard for Americans and hard for American families,” she added.
But Rice won’t necessarily be leading the charge from D.C. The longtime political operative said she has “absolutely zero” desire to return to the nation’s capitol.
“I hope that what we will do is move on to the next generation of leadership. Even people like me, I was in Washington a total of 10 years — two years with George H.W. Bush, eight years with George W. Bush — I shouldn’t go back,” Rice said. “We ought to move on to the next generation, move ahead and deal with the American people’s issues.”
Rice currently resides in Stanford, Calif., and is the director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
