Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) continued her media blitz this week by speaking to MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, a previous White House aide from George W. Bush's administration. Wallace has since abandoned the Republican Party — blaming Donald Trump.
Liz Cheney's book "Oath and Honor" was released Tuesday and exposes some former colleagues as knowing full well that there was no election fraud in 2020 and that Trump lost. Others are shown by Cheney to have been too scared of Donald Trump to stand up for themselves.
Kevin McCarthy, however, was speaking out of both sides of his mouth while issuing threats to his own members, she wrote.
Ahead of the Tuesday evening's interview, MSNBC's national affairs analyst John Heilemann suggested that Wallace asked Cheney where she thinks the GOP began to lose its way. Did it begin with Trump or before, and what does she thinks it will take to bring it back?
Cheney compared the Jan. 6 attacks to 9/11, recalling George W. Bush saying that people can attack buildings but can't attack the foundation of American democracy. On Jan. 6, they did try to bring down American democracy, she said.
She went on to attack now-House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).
"I think he was desperate for Donald Trump's approval," she said.
Wallace asked if Johnson was more dangerous than former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Cheney said that Johnson was "smarter."
"Now certainly, as I write in the book, at every moment he had the opportunity to make a tough decision, he made the wrong decision," said Cheney. "So, this is not a defense of him. I think both men are the embodiment of what's happened to our party."
"The party has become seized by a cult of personality," Cheney continued.
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She recalled chatting with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's former Secretary of State. Among the things she asked was if she knew of any examples of countries that came through something like the Trump experience and were able to pull out of it.
Rice told her, "not without great violence."
When addressing her work on the House Select Committee investigating 2020 and the Jan. 6 election, Cheney said that Democrats didn't tell the story. All of the witnesses who appeared and gave testimony were Republicans.
She points to a part of her book in which she describes military officials releasing a statement saying that anyone who attempts to use the military as part of some kind of coup effort would be prosecuted. While it's something that a military official might go to the White House and tell the president personally, Cheney said it was important to make it clear publicly.
It sparked Trump's fury and threats he would fire anyone at the Pentagon who spoke out like that again, she said.
When talking about the Committee investigations into Trump, Wallace recalled that there were threats of violence during the Speaker's race.
See the first part of the interview below or at the link here.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
