Cheney: Republicans who stuck by Trump ‘will not be judged well by history’

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said in an interview on Tuesday that her fellow Republicans in Congress who have stuck by former President Trump following the Jan. 6 Capitol attack “will not be judged well by history.”

Haley Byrd Wilt, associate editor of The Dispatch, asked Cheney how the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 plans on providing a clear picture of the Capitol attack that is widely accepted by people across the political spectrum when the panel appeared to have little support from or involvement with the GOP. Cheney is one of only two Republican lawmakers on the committee, along with outgoing Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.).

Cheney pointed out that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had ultimately made the decision not to appoint people from his party to the committee. McCarthy withdrew his appointments after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected Republican Reps. Jim Banks (Ind.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio), who he had named, as appointees.

Cheney told Wilt that the picture of Jan. 6 that the committee currently has is that Trump “summoned” the rioters to Washington, D.C., and “told them to march on the Capitol.”

“I think [Trump’s] actions and the actions of those people who continue to defend president Trump will not be judged well by history,” Cheney said. “And so part of our committee’s responsibility is to get the facts for history, to make sure people have all of those on which to make judgements going forward.”

Cheney recalled that immediately after the attack, Republicans were unified in their condemnation of what had occurred. However, she said that many of her GOP colleagues now seem to be “willing to minimize and whitewash what happened,” though she added that “they won’t be successful.”

Reflecting back on Jan. 6, 2021, Cheney told Wilt that she remembers being “very angry.”

“In the chamber, I remember the disbelief that it could possibly be happening. I remember, certainly, Representative Raskin telling me that there was a Confederate flag flying inside the Capitol. And just the disbelief that we were there at the heart of our constitutional republic and that we had a violent mob attempting to break into the chamber,” said Cheney.

Earlier this week, Cheney said that Trump was “at war with the rule of law” and warned that he may likely repeat the very same claims that incited rioters to break into the Capitol during the upcoming one-year anniversary of Jan. 6.

“I think that if what he has been saying since he left office is any indication, former President Trump is likely again this week to make the same false claims about the election that he knows to be false and the same false claims about the election that he knows caused violence on Jan. 6,” said Cheney.

“If he makes those same claims, he’s doing it with complete understanding and knowledge of what those claims have caused in the past,” she said.