Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) suggested Sunday morning that former President Donald Trump may have intentionally provoked more violence during last month’s insurrectionary rebellion, when he attacked then Vice President Mike Pence on Twitter while thousands of his followers invaded the US Capitol.
The day after the Wyoming Republican Party censored Cheney and asked for his resignation for voting for Trump’s impeachment for his role in inciting the January 6 seditious rebellion, the third-tier Republican appeared on Fox News Sunday to declare that she will not resign.
“As I have already explained and will continue to explain to supporters across the state and voters across the state, the oath I took to the Constitution forced me to vote for impeachment and does not lean towards partisanship, not to give in to political pressure”, Cheney told Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. “It is the most important oath we take and therefore I will defend it and I will continue to fight for all the issues that are so important to us across Wyoming.”
Her state party’s censorship comes in the wake of the House Republicans’ attempt last week to remove her from the position of President of the House Republican Conference. The Wyoming congresswoman survived while her colleagues voted 145-61 to keep her in office.
Cheney also attacked the Republican Party and Trump for publicizing the “Big Lie” that the election was “stolen” by President Joe Biden and falsely claiming that pro-Trump protesters were not responsible for the deadly violence on Capitol Hill.
“Party people are wrong,” he said. “They believe that the BLM and the antifa were behind what happened here on Capitol. It is simply not the case, it is not true and we will have a lot of work to do ”.
“People were deceived,” she continued. “It was a lie to what extent President Trump, in the months before January 6, spread the notion that the election was stolen or that the election was rigged. And people need to understand that. We need to make sure that we, as Republicans, are the party of the truth ”.
Cheney, the highest-ranking Republican to vote for Trump’s impeachment, said “the greatest threat to our public is a president who would put his own interests above the Constitution”, adding that Trump did “everything he could to steal” election and ended the attack on the Capitol.
Pressed by Wallace if she would vote to convict Trump on impeachment if she were in the Senate, Cheney said she would “hear the evidence” while mentioning Trump’s January 6 tweet attacking Pence.
“People are going to 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 many, many criminal investigations looking at all aspects of this and everyone involved, as it should, but I keep my statement firm,” concluded Cheney. “We have never seen this type of attack by a President of the United States on another branch of government and it can never happen again.”
The tweet in question, sent by Trump while the insurrection was 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 a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones that were asked to certify previously. The USA demands the truth! “