(PresidentialWire.com)- Liz Cheney used the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol building to launch her own attacks on members of her political party.
The Republican representative from Wyoming — who has long been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump — slammed those in the GOP who continue to remain in “lockstep” behind Trump, even though she believes he’s ultimately culpable for the actions on January 6.
Cheney has been a prominent political force working against Republicans who have shown allegiance to Trump ever since the attacks last year. She is one of only two Republicans who is sitting on the House’s special investigating committee for the January 6 attacks, and she’s used that platform to launch attacks on where her party is going.
In fact, Cheney is the vice chairwoman of that committee, even though she’s been criticized and ostracized by her own colleagues in Congress. Early in 2021, Cheney was removed from her spot as the third-ranking Republican in the House.
On the one-year anniversary of the attacks this year, Cheney spoke with Savannah Guthrie of NBC. She said that “we came very close [to] the violent overthrow of a valid election] in January 2021.
She continued:
“Our institutions held, but they only held because of the people who were willing to stand up against the pressure from former President Trump. We came very close and we need to recognize how important it is that the system depends upon individuals and that we make sure that it never happens again.”
These are pretty direct remarks from Cheney about the former leader of her party. Many people, in fact, believe Trump is still the leader of the Republican Party, even though he’s not serving in any official capacity.
Words like those are usually reserved for members of the other party, such as President Joe Biden, who gave quite the fiery speech on January 6 that attacked Trump, even if he didn’t mention him directly by name.
Instead, he referred to Trump as the “defeated former president” when he said:
“For the first time in our history, a president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent a peaceful transition of power as a violent mob reached the Capitol. But they failed. They failed. And on this day of remembrance, we must make sure that such an attack never, never happens again.”
Following the speech, Trump released a statement of his own that labeled Biden’s words as “political theater” as well as “just a distraction for the fact Biden has completely and totally failed.”
Trump had initially planned to hold his own press conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on January 6. But, some of his closest advisors and allies in Congress and the media talked him out of doing so.
After she was questioned about Trump’s comments on Biden’s speech, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said of the former president on Thursday:
“Well, it looks like he saw the speech. I guess that’s good news. Maybe he learned something about what it looks like to meet the moment in the country.”
