Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) suggested Sunday morning that former President Donald Trump deliberately provoked more violence during last month’s uprising when he attacked then Vice President Mike Pence on Twitter as thousands of his followers stormed the Capitol.
A day after the Wyoming Republican Party censored Cheney and called for her resignation because she voted to impeach Trump for his role in instigating the January 6 inflammatory riot, the third-ranked House Republican appeared on Fox News Sunday to declare that she will not resign.
“As I have 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 it doesn’t bow to partiality, it doesn’t.” Don’t bow 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 are so important to us throughout Wyoming.”
Her state party’s disapproval follows House Republicans’ attempt to impeach her as chairman of the House Republican Conference last week. The Wyoming congressman survived when her colleagues voted 145-61 to keep her in the post.
Cheney also took a swing at both the GOP and Trump for leading the ‘Big Lie’ that the election was ‘stolen’ by President Joe Biden and falsely claiming that pro-Trump rioters were not responsible for the deadly violence in the Capitol .
“People in the party are mistaken,” she said. “They believe that BLM and Antifa behind what happened here in the Capitol happened. It’s just not the case, isn’t it and we will have to do a lot of work. “
“People have been lied to,” she continued. “The extent to which President Trump spread the idea for months to January 6 that the election had been stolen or that the election had been faked was a lie. And people need to understand that. We must make sure that we as Republicans are the party of truth. “
Cheney, the House’s top Republican who voted for Trump’s impeachment, said the “biggest threat to our public is a president who would put his self-interest above the constitution,” adding that Trump did everything he could to steal. . The election and it ended with the attack on the Capitol.
Under pressure from Wallace whether she would vote to condemn Trump of impeachment if she was in the Senate, Cheney said she would “listen to the evidence” as she brought up Trump’s January 6 tweet attacking Pence.
“People are going to want to know exactly what the president was doing,” she stated. “For example, they want to know if the tweet he sent out calling Vice President Pence a coward while the attack was going on, or whether that tweet was a premeditated act to provoke violence.”
“There are a lot of questions to be answered and there will be a lot of criminal investigations going into every aspect of this and everyone involved, as it should be, but I’m firm on my statement,” Cheney concluded. “We have never seen such an attack by a president of the United States on any other branch of the government and it can never happen again.”
The tweet in question, sent by Trump when the uprising got out of hand, said: “ Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our constitution, giving states a chance to Corrected a set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate facts they were previously required to certify. USA demands the truth! “