Republicans seem to be very serious about sending Liz Cheney to jail.
GOP Representative Barry Loudermilk, the chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, released his own findings on the House January 6 select committee. The report accused former Cheney, who sat on the committee, of witness tampering, alleging that she “colluded with ‘star witness’ Cassidy Hutchinson.” Hutchinson is the former Trump White House aide turned MAGA villain after she testified before the January 6 committee on the chaos surrounding the attack on the Capitol.
Loudermilk’s findings also called for Cheney to be criminally investigated and repeatedly claimed the January 6 committee withheld or destroyed evidence. He conveniently notes that “this interim report reveals that there was not just one single cause for what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6; but it was a series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at several levels and numerous entities.”
This is yet another installment in the string of extrajudicial threats lobbed at Cheney. Most of them are from President-elect Donald Trump, who has long despised Cheney after she supported his first impeachment.
This all comes after Trump clarified his revenge list for the umpteenth time earlier this month on Meet the Press.
“I think those people committed a major crime, and [Liz] Cheney was behind it,” he said of the January 6 committee. “And so was Benny Thompson. Everybody on that committee.… For what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail.”
Rumors about potential preemptive pardons for Cheney and other members of the January 6 committee have circulated, but no one has been granted one at this juncture.