GOP Rep. Liz Cheney delivered a scathing indictment of former President Donald Trump and members of the GOP on Monday in one of her first speeches since her primary defeat last month. Cheney this week delivered the Walter Berns Constitution Day lecture at AEI, a center-right economic think tank in Washington, warning that America’s freedom is in jeopardy and urging the country to hold Trump accountable for his role in riot in the Capitol of January 6 . Cheney, as the top Republican on the House Select Committee investigating the insurgency, has long been one of Trump’s few outspoken critics in the GOP — an attitude that ultimately cost her her seat in Congress after Trump passed months supporting her Republican challenger. However, Cheney on Monday did not dwell on her political woes, choosing instead to further rebuke Trump’s actions, or lack thereof, on January 6, 2021. “I hope you all heard the testimony at our select committee hearings about Pat Cipollone, corroborated by Cassidy Hutchinson and others on President Trump’s White House staff,” he said. “Testimony that President Trump was the only person who refused to respond to desperate calls for help, even from his allies in Congress. He refused to help them.” Several witnesses, including Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee they were baffled by Trump’s inaction as rioters stormed the US capital on January 6. In her speech on Monday, Cheney suggested that Trump’s second-in-command, Mike Pence, take over the role of his chief. “If you’ve been watching our hearings closely, you understand that Vice President Mike Pence was essentially the president for most of the day,” he said. “The White House staff knew it, as did every other Republican and Democratic leader in Washington.” After Trump attacked Pence on Twitter for refusing to throw out the Electoral College votes for President Joe Biden, rioters across Capitol Hill began chanting “hang Mike Pence.” Hutchinson testified earlier this summer that Trump defended the insurgents’ call for violence, saying “Mike deserves it.” In his recent autobiography, “So Help Me God,” Pence wrote that he was not afraid during the events of Jan. 6, but he was angry. “I was outraged by what I saw, how he desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters, who would never do such a thing here or anywhere else,” Pence wrote. According to “The Divider,” a new book by Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, Trump has said he would not choose Pence as his running mate if he launches a campaign in 2024. “It would be totally inappropriate” to pick Pence as his running mate, Trump said, according to the book. “Mike killed himself politically,” the former told Glasser and Baker. In her speech, Cheney also urged people to rewatch testimony from the committee’s summer hearings and hear what several of Trump’s former officials had to say about the then-president’s actions after 2020 while under oath. “How could Trump’s refusal to act, betraying him or our Democracy, our Constitution, our principles, come without a cost?” he said.
