Liz Cheney secretly listened in on a Trump campaign planning call for Jan. 6: book
December 04, 2023
Speaking to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) revealed she was secretly listening to Donald Trump's lawyers as they plotted Jan. 6.
One of the excerpts in her new book, out Tuesday, is that the Trump campaign held a call on Jan. 4 where the legal team was telling some of the top campaign surrogates what they were planning and what they wanted folks saying on cable news.
Cheney also reveals internal GOP memos that show the party attacking Trump for his behavior on Jan. 6 that was never made public.
"You describe listening in on a call in which Trump lawyers are briefing what we call surrogates," Maddow explained. "That's basically people that are going to go on TV and talk about the pro-Trump rally. They describe what they're envisioning for Jan. 6th. The way you write it is in the scenario Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis described when [Vice President Mike] Pence was presiding he could either refuse to open or refuse to count the electoral votes. They don't necessarily know you are on this call. You are listening in two days before Jan. 6th. Was that the moment when it really became clear to you, in detail, what they were trying to do?"
Cheney agreed that it was.
"You know, I had heard — obviously, there had been talk about we're going to have these electors meet," said Cheney. "Steven Miller had been talking about that, but it wasn't clear to me what the contours of this particular part of the plan were until I dialed into that phone call. And listening to them describe how these fake electors were going to be used and the fact that they anticipated that Vice President Pence was going to use them to refuse to count the legitimate electors was certainly a moment of — of intense concern."
She said once she got off the call, she ran into the office of the Parliamentarian of the House to reveal what she was hearing and flagging that it was going to happen.
"What do we do about it in the joint session? How do we stop this?" Cheney recalled asking.
"And it was very clear that there were not a lot of good answers to that because I knew — I learned later through the investigation that Vice President Pence and his counsel were having discussions with the Senate Parliamentarian and that the vice president, ultimately, of course, did his duty bravely," she continued. "But if you are in a joint session of Congress, you know, you're not in a position where there are a lot of legislative steps that you can take except to basically move to adjourn. So, it was a very dangerous and chilling moment."
Raw Story has full coverage of Cheney's book here.
See the clip of Cheney in the video below or at the link here.
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