Donald Trump has made clear he wants the FBI to target his enemies – Liz Cheney, in particular – and a columnist called on fellow journalists and Democratic lawmakers to force Republicans to confront these threats.
GOP lawmakers like Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) have waved away the president-elect's threats as merely bluster, but The New Republic's Greg Sargent said Trump has already seized on the purported findings by a House Republican investigation into the Jan. 6 committee on which Cheney served, saying the report showed she "could be in a lot of trouble."
"Note the trademark mobspeak here: Cheney could be in a lot of trouble for federal lawbreaking, Trump declares, as if he’s merely a passive observer remarking on the danger she faces, rather than someone who will control the nation’s sprawling federal law enforcement apparatus in just over a month," Sargent wrote. "Trump has been raging at Cheney for years and has amplified suggestions that she should face televised military tribunals."
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"Now, in a dark turn in this whole farcical saga, Trump is pretending that House Republicans have given him a legitimate basis for prosecuting Cheney, when in fact their claims were cooked up in bad faith for precisely that purpose," Sargent added.
The columnist knocks down the House GOP report's claims of alleged wrongdoing by the former congresswoman to be "entirely baseless," saying that legal experts found nothing to support witness tampering allegations in that report or in books published by Cheney and former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson about the Jan. 6 probe.
“The FBI has very strict guidelines for when they can open investigations,” said Kristy Parker, counsel at Protect Democracy and a former federal prosecutor. “The GOP report does not provide any information that would credibly justify a criminal inquiry.”
Many of the headlines about the House GOP report treat the subject matter as an ordinary political dispute, but Sargent said the situation was unprecedented in U.S. history, and he said Republicans must be forced to go on the record on whether they support Trump's FBI nominee Kash Patel carrying out what the president-elect has explicitly threatened to do.
"Senate Republicans appear willing to confirm Patel while knowing full well that Trump has expressly chosen him to carry out this extraordinary and degenerate abuse of power," Sargent said.
"All of that is the story," he added. "How is it conceivable that the media is treating this as a conventional political moment? Trump’s veiled threat toward Cheney should prompt the press to revisit those reassurances from Republicans. GOP senators should be hounded mercilessly by reporters on whether they’ll knowingly support Patel now that Trump has made the corrupt reality of the situation so inescapably, alarmingly clear."