About a month ago, amid speculation about President Joe Biden weighing pre-emptive pardons, Republican Rep. Dan Meuser appeared on Newsmax and derided the discussion as “nonsense.” The Pennsylvanian quickly explained why such pardons would be entirely unnecessary.
“Nobody’s going to be going after Liz Cheney,” Meuser said, referring to the former House Republican Conference chair who helped lead the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee.
Two weeks later, Meuser’s GOP colleagues on the House Administration Committee formally requested that the FBI investigate Cheney. To be sure, the Republicans’ case against the former Wyoming congresswoman was impossible to take seriously, but it served as a timely reminder that many in the party are still eager to target a lifelong Republican who served as the chair of the House GOP conference as recently as 2021.
Indeed, no one seems more focused on punishing Cheney than Donald Trump, who recently appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and said the former congresswoman and her colleagues on the Jan. 6 panel “should go to jail.” The president-elect soon after declared by way of his social media platform that Cheney “could be in a lot of trouble,” pointing to the referral to the FBI.
On Friday afternoon, apparently furious that President Joe Biden had awarded Cheney the Presidential Citizens Medal a day earlier, the president-elect published yet another tantrum by way of his social media platform, falsely accusing Cheney of having been “proven to be totally corrupt.” He added that she and her Jan. 6 committee colleagues “destroyed and deleted all evidence from their crooked investigation of January 6th.” (This absurd claim has been thoroughly discredited.)
Trump concluded, in apparent reference to the Jan. 6 panel’s leaders, “They have destroyed the lives of many people, and are rewarded by getting Biden Fake Medals. This is not America. January 20th cannot come fast enough.” The missive came two weeks after the president-elect published a related item that described Cheney as “disgusting” and falsely accused her of having committed “egregious and unthinkable acts of crime.”
It was against this backdrop that House Speaker Mike Johnson made a curious vow the day before he was elected to serve a second term: The Hill reported that the Louisiana Republican announced that the GOP-led chamber would investigate the investigatory committee — again.
“The Jan 6 Select Committee manipulated AND destroyed evidence — created a fake, phony narrative all to try and hurt Trump,” Johnson added. … “Be assured of this: House Republicans WILL continue our investigation into this corrupt committee and it will be FULLY FUNDED so it can continue next Congress,” he continued.
At this point, we could talk about the fact that the committee did not, in reality, destroy evidence. We could also detail the fact that there was nothing “fake” or “phony” about the select panel’s findings, and to describe the bipartisan committee as “corrupt” is ridiculous.
But of particular interest in this instance is the House speaker’s eagerness to investigate the defunct committee — which is bizarre given that House Republicans just spent two years investigating the same committee and they came up with nothing. To be sure, it’s possible that Johnson knew this, but he promised to keep the probe going as part of an effort to shore up far-right support the day before a contentious vote on his political future. But whatever the motivation, it appears the GOP’s pointless crusade will continue. None of this has escaped Cheney’s attention. The Wyoming Republican, responding to the president-elect’s latest online tirades, wrote, “Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you. Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former Vice President prevented you from overturning our Republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our Constitutional Republic — to protect the America we love from you.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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