Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) hit Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for meeting with former President Trump alongside the Senate GOP on Thursday.
Cheney, who lost her seat in a primary battle in the 2022 cycle, said the meeting shows McConnell is enabling the former president, whom she called “a danger to our Republic.”
“Mitch McConnell knows Trump provoked the violent attack on our Capitol and then ‘watched television happily’ as his mob brutally beat police officers and hunted the Vice President,” she wrote on the social platform X. “He knows Trump refused for hours to tell his mob to leave and ‘even then with police officers bleeding … he kept repeating his election lies and praising the criminals.’”
“He knows Trump committed a ‘disgraceful dereliction of duty’ and is a danger to our Republic,” she continued. “Trump and his collaborators will be defeated, and history will remember the shame of people like McConnell who enabled them.”
Trump’s meeting with Republican senators marked the first time he was on Capitol Hill since 2021. It also marked the first time he had been in the same room with McConnell since 2020, following years of feuding between the two.
McConnell told reporters after the meeting that it was “positive.”
“He and I got a chance to talk; we shook hands a few times. He got a lot of standing ovations,” he said. “It was an entirely positive meeting. I can’t think of anything to tell you out of it that was negative.”
The former president also met with the House GOP earlier Thursday — a meeting that comes as Republicans in both chambers begin to prepare a bullish agenda in the event he is reelected and the GOP controls both the House and Senate.
Cheney was one of a handful of Republicans who consistently tried to hold Trump responsible for the attack on the Capitol. She served on the House Jan. 6 committee and cited the Capitol riots as responsible for her fallout with the GOP.
The former congresswoman has since turned into one of Trump’s loudest critics in the party. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a similarly vocal critic, initially planned not to attend the meeting but changed his mind when a flight out of town was canceled.