Cheney Condemns Trump and Republicans Ahead of Jan 6 Hearings
Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney went on "Dispatch Live" Tuesday night and spoke with Stephen Hayes and David French about the Jan. 6 Select Committee's upcoming public hearings.
On Thursday, the committee, on which Cheney sits as vice-chair, plans to begin hearings showcasing the evidence it has been collecting over the past year on the timeline of the day itself and the rhetoric surrounding the 2020 election.
The hearings will continue into the following week, with a final report planned to be released in September.
Cheney said when asked what the goal of the hearings was, that they plan to provide a detailed account of what happened.
"I think, first of all, with the hearings themselves you know, it’s part of our responsibility as a committee charged with investigating what happened on January 6th, and what led up to it, and ensuring that we have a complete picture about what happens so that we can make recommendations if we need to legislatively," Cheney said. "I think it's really important for the American people to understand how the attack unfolded, to understand what provoked the attack...And so, I think that we will be in a position to show, sort of, an initial set of findings and to begin to walk through what happened and to make sure that we're taking steps necessary, legislatively, so that it never happens again."
When asked about the makeup of the committee, that it only has two Republicans, Cheney said it's the Republicans' fault that the committee doesn't have more Republicans.
"I wish that we had had the bipartisan commission that, unfortunately, the Republicans in the House and then the Republicans in the Senate killed," Cheney said. "And I think that's a really important point. But once that bipartisan commission had been rejected by my party, by the Republicans, the question became, 'Are you going to investigate?' Or are you simply going to say, you know, 'too bad,' we're gonna throw our hands up and walk away?... This was a violent assault on the United States Capitol, and it was provoked by a sitting president of the United States... He oversaw a multi-part plan that was focused on and the objective of which was for him to stay in power, to overturn the results of an election and stay in power. And I would say to people, as you're listening to, you know, some of my colleagues and others who think that the way to respond to this investigation is with politics and partisanship those people are not acting in a way that is healthy for the country."
Before the current committee was formed at the end of June 2021, there was an attempt to form a bipartisan commission, similar to the one formed after 9/11, however, Republicans in the Senate killed it with the filibuster.
Cheney said that there is more to what happened on Jan. 6 than just what happened that day, as the events leading up to it and following it also demonstrate the need for the committee.
"People need to stop and think about the fact that as the violence ended that day, as the mob began to leave the Capitol, the President didn't condemn them," Cheney said. "If you look at what he said at 6:01, he justified it. He said, ‘these are the things that happen.’ And so I think that's a really important part of this. You can see very much his tweet on December 19th talking about, you know, be wild, be here on January 6th. You've had now both members of the Oath Keepers and members of the Proud Boys, some pled guilty, some have been indicted for seditious conspiracy...And you can also hear the defendants in a number of these cases, in a number of people that the Committee has interviewed who say, ‘yeah, we came, we were in the Capitol, we came that day, we were doing what Donald Trump wanted us to do, and he told us the election was stolen, and so we came because we thought we could change things.' So, it's connected and I think that's what's really important for people to understand, and the fact that he has continued in the aftermath to make the same claims and to say the same things."
Cheney said that everyone around Trump knows that he lost the election, but that didn't stop him and others from saying the election was stolen.
"You know, his own campaign told him he’d lost the election. His Department of Justice told him there's no evidence that there was fraud here that would have overturned the election. They tracked down the allegations that he was hearing and they told him they weren't true. His own Department of Homeland Security told him. He lost all of his cases in court. And yet, you know, he still continued to spread the lie, and people believed it and they still continue to believe it. So, I think everybody who knows it's not true, which is the majority of people in my party, has a duty to say so, has a duty to say, 'this is just not true.' You know, you may have wished the election had turned out differently, but it didn't."