It’s difficult to imagine a worse week for an incumbent member of Congress than the one Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney just caused for herself. In the space of one January 6th Committee hearing Monday, Cheney managed to destroy her own theory of the cause of the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol, permitted the presentation of obviously doctored evidence, and personally introduced a January 6th timeline of events that has been revealed to be a work of fiction.
Over the course of the week, Cheney’s dishonesty was exposed one piece at a time.
On top of it all, it was disclosed that her re-election campaign is being heavily bankrolled by major donors to The Lincoln Project, which has moved on from attacking President Donald Trump and has focused its attention on defeating Republicans from coast to coast.
It is now beyond doubt that Cheney is happy to be used as a tool of the Democrats simply because it furthers her quest to inflict damage on President Trump.
Cheney wrecked her own theory
Cheney has spent months publicly building the case that President Trump orchestrated a conspiracy with the intent to cause mayhem at the U.S. Capitol, but she blew her own theory apart with her stunt of reading aloud texts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows from Fox News hosts and Donald Trump Jr.
Far from proving the grand scheme she imagined, Cheney instead illustrated that the conservative media figures she reviles, and the President’s own son, were shocked and horrified by what they saw occurring on January 6th and urged Trump to publicly call for calm. That these major media figures and Trump Jr. were taken aback by events only bolsters the previous finding of the FBI that there was no organized plot on that day.
Sham hearing relied on bogus evidence
Cheney was a key participant in the hearing in which Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) presented a slide purporting to show a text message from a member of Congress arguing that Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Schiff showed an image he claimed was a text from Rep. Jim Jordon (R-OH) to Meadows.
As first reported by The Federalist, the text was heavily doctored and redacted, altering the actual content of the message, misrepresenting its original source, and removing paragraphs that failed to support Schiff’s premise that the opinions presented were Jordan’s own. After the story of the falsified evidence broke, the committee issued a partial admission of culpability.
While this was happening, Cheney sat silently and played along with the Democrat majority on the committee.
Cheney spun lies with January 6th timeline
Having seen her dream of proving a conspiracy evaporate, Cheney shifted to claiming that Trump waited too long to react to the events unfolding at the Capitol. She charged that “for 187 minutes, President Trump refused to act,” which amounted to a “supreme dereliction of duty” from someone who should have stepped forward to stop the chaos.
In fact, there was no 187-minute delay.
According to a sequence of events compiled by the New York Times, the first building breach occurred at 2:13 p.m. Trump’s first tweet calling for calm was posted at 2:38 p.m., when he said, “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
Half an hour later, Trump tweeted again, writing, “I am asking everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”
At 4:17 p.m., Trump tweeted a video calling on the protestors to be peaceful and go home, but it was removed when Trump’s Twitter account was locked by the social media platform.
Cheney’s claim of a delay of more than three hours is indisputably false.
Lincoln Project Loves Cheney
It should come as no surprise, then, that major donors to the anti-Republican attack group The Lincoln Project are strong supporters of Cheney. Originally begun as a means to defeat President Trump in the 2020 election, The Lincoln Project has shifted its focus to attacking a wide variety of Republicans running for office across the country.
Major Lincoln Project donors have given a total of almost $55,000 to Cheney’s re-election campaign and related committees in 2021:
Ron Conway gave $50,000 to the Lincoln Project and $21,600 to Cheney.
John Pritzker gave $100,000 to the Lincoln Project and $21,600 to Cheney.
Martha Karsh gave $50,000 to the Lincoln Project and $5,800 to Cheney.
Stephen Mandel gave $1,000,000 to the Lincoln Project and $2,900 to Cheney.
Christy Walton gave $30,000 to the Lincoln Project and $2,900 to Cheney.
Harriet Hageman, Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Wyoming, today issued the following statement:
“All of this should put to bed the idea that Liz Cheney is somehow standing on principle when she attacks President Trump. She has undermined her own theory, allowed the presentation of fabricated evidence, and purposely presented a timeline that is demonstrably false. She pursued all of this dishonesty because she is blinded by her hatred of Donald Trump and will stop at nothing to try to harm him.
“Liz Cheney makes high-minded claims of wanting to save the soul of the Republican Party, but she associates with known liars like Adam Schiff and allows herself to be used by Nancy Pelosi as a convenient weapon against Republicans of all kinds. She is not, as she claims, the ranking Republican member of the sham January 6th Committee, but is in fact a Pelosi appointee. Cheney is a willing pawn of Pelosi and the Democrats as they attempt to do two things: damage President Trump’s future political prospects and distract the public from the disaster that is the Biden administration.
“This week provided the best proof yet that Liz Cheney is not fit to hold public office, let alone represent Wyoming in Congress. We only get one member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Cheney has wasted it on her own personal war with Trump. Wyomingites deserve a member of Congress who looks out for them, not her own self-aggrandizing crusade.”
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