House Republicans say Liz Cheney should be investigated during Jan. 6 committee work

WASHINGTON — A Republican chairman said Tuesday that the FBI should investigate former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., over her involvement in the last congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol.

“Based on the evidence obtained by this subcommittee, several federal laws were likely violated by Liz Cheney, the former vice chair of the Select Committee on January 6, and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” said an interim report published by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who chairs the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee, which investigated the select committee on Jan. 6.

The report alleged Republicans found evidence showing Cheney “tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without her attorney’s knowledge.”

“This secret communication with a witness is inappropriate,” the report said.

In addition, the report said the FBI should investigate Cheney for allegedly violating a law that prohibits any person from procuring another person to commit perjury. which Republicans have accused Hutchinson of doing in his testimony to the committee.

The report accused Cheney of helping Hutchinson obtain new advice; while the report claims they spoke directly to each other without a lawyer’s knowledge, it indicated that the Republicans do not appear to know what they were discussing.

Cheney said in a declaration in response to the report that on January 6 Trump showed who he really is, “a cruel and vindictive man who allowed violent attacks against our Capitol and law enforcement officers to continue while he watched television and refused for hours to instruct his supporters about to get up and go.”

The select committee’s 10 public hearings and final report featured numerous Republican witnesses, including many senior officials from Trump’s White House, campaign and administration, Cheney noted in the statement. Their testimony was laid out in thousands of pages of transcripts and a “very detailed and carefully sourced” 800-page report that was made public and whose conclusions the Justice Department had also reached in a separate investigation, she said.

Loudermilk’s preliminary report “willfully ignores the truth and the Select Committee’s overwhelming weight of evidence and instead concocts lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did,” she alleged. “Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence and are a malicious and cowardly attack on the truth.”

Reacting to the report Wednesday, Trump said on Truth Social that Cheney “could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee.”

The president-elect recently suggested in an exclusive interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that the members of the Jan. 6 panel should be jailed. Those former members, including its Democratic chairman, have said the committee did nothing wrong and did not break the law.

Hutchinson was considered a star witness for the Jan. 6 committee, which was formed in the last Congress under the House’s Democratic majority and included two Republicans: Cheney, who was vice chairman, and then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois. Hutchinson, a close aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified privately and publicly to the committee about her knowledge of the lead-up to Jan. 6 and what unfolded that day.

Hutchinson testified that she was told by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato that after Trump’s “Stop the Steal” meeting at the White House Oval, Trump insisted to the Secret Service that he go to the Capitol, where he had urged his supporters to go. afterwards. Hutchinson testified that she was told Trump cursed at his security guards after being told they couldn’t go to the Capitol, grabbed the steering wheel of his SUV from the back seat and then reached for the “clavicles” of Bobby Engel, Trump’s head of security, who eventually forwarded his account to Ornato.

While Republicans say there have been witnesses who have disputed Hutchinson’s account, it has also been corroborated by others. Ornato later told the committee that he did not remember the conversation she said they had with Engel.

An attorney representing Hutchinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Her lawyers earlier said in a statement that she stood by her testimony to the committee on Jan. 6.