Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) suggested Sunday morning that former President Donald Trump may have intentionally provoked more violence during last month’s insurgent riots when he attacked then-Vice President Mike Pence on Twitter as thousands of followers stormed the United States Capitol.
A day after the Wyoming Republican Party censored Cheney and asked him to resign to vote to charge Trump for his role in inciting the January 6 seditious revolt, the third Republican in the House appeared in Fox News Sunday to declare that he will not leave office.
“As I have explained and will continue to explain to supporters across the state and to voters across the state, the oath I took to the Constitution forced me to vote for dismissal and not lean towards partisanship, no‘ No bend to political pressure, ”Cheney told Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. “It’s the most important oath we take and so I will keep it and continue to fight for all the issues that matter so much to us all over Wyoming.”
Her state party’s censorship comes in the wake of last week’s attempts by House Republicans to oust her as president of the House Republican Conference. The Wyoming congresswoman survived when her colleagues voted between 145 and 61 to continue in office.
Cheney also made a twist on both the Republican Party and Trump to deal with the “Big Lie” that the election was “stolen” by President Joe Biden and falsely claim that pro-Trump riots were not responsible for the deadly violence. to the Chapters.
“The people of the party are wrong,” he stated. “They believe that BLM and Antifa were behind what happened here at the Capitol. It’s just not the case, it’s not true and we’re going to have a lot of work to do. “
“People have been lied to,” he continued. “The extent to which President Trump, for months prior to Jan. 6, spread the notion that the election had been stolen or that the election was called, was a lie. And people have to understand that. to make sure we Republicans are the party of truth. ”
Cheney, the highest-ranking House Republican who has voted for Trump’s ouster, said “the only major threat to our public is a president who would put his own interest above the Constitution,” and he added that Trump did “everything he could to steal” the election and ended the attack on the Capitol.
Pressured by Wallace if she would vote to convict Trump of dismissal if he were in the Senate, Cheney said she would “listen to the evidence” while presenting Trump’s Jan. 6 tweet attacking Pence.
“People will want to know exactly what the president was doing,” he said. “They want to know, for example, whether the tweet he sent calling Vice President Pence a coward while the attack was underway, whether that tweet, for example, was a premeditated effort to provoke violence.”
“There are many questions that need to be answered and there will be many, many criminal investigations that look at all aspects and all those involved, as there should be, but I am firm in my statement,” Cheney concluded. “We’ve never seen this kind of assault by a U.S. president on another branch of government and that can never happen again.”
The tweet in question, sent by Trump as the insurgency went out of control, said, “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution, giving “States have the opportunity to certify a joint correction of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones they were asked to certify beforehand. The US demands the truth!”