(WASHINGTON) — Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has shrugged off Donald Trump’s suggestion on social media that she and other members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated Jan. 6 should be jailed.
The former president attacked Cheney and the others on social media this week. He also questioned whether Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide in his White House, would be “prosecuted” because part of her testimony to the committee changed over time and has been disputed.
Neither Hutchinson nor Cheney or the Jan. 6 committee members have been accused of a specific crime.
“She should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee,” Trump wrote about Cheney on Sunday on his social media platform, reposting articles making claims that the Jan. 6 committee suppressed evidence during their investigation.
Cheney, a former member of Republican House leadership-turned-vocal Trump critic, responded bluntly to his threats.
“Lying in all caps doesn’t make it true, Donald,” she posted on X later on Sunday. “You know you and your lawyers have long had the evidence.”
The back and forth comes as a Republican-led House committee last week released a report on their investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and the previous Jan. 6 committee.
The new report claimed that Hutchinson’s 2022 testimony about what she was told of then-President Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 was contradicted, in part, by Trump’s driver that day.
In her public committee testimony, Hutchinson recalled a conversation she had at the White House on Jan. 6 with Bobby Engel, part of Trump’s security detail, and Trump White House staffer Tony Ornato.
Hutchinson said she was told on Jan. 6 that Trump had lunged at a Secret Service agent in anger after he was told he could not go to the Capitol the day.
Trump denies all wrongdoing.
In a statement last week, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democrat who led the previous Jan. 6 committee, pushed back on the new report’s findings and said the work, led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican, was “dishonest.”
On Monday, Trump took direct aim at Hutchinson, one of the previous committee’s central witnesses.
In the interview with his former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, Trump claimed Hutchinson “made up” her story and that the Jan. 6 committee “destroyed” its evidence.
“And I say what’s gonna happen to her?” he said of Hutchinson.
“The whole thing was such a fake story,” Trump continued.
In the wake of last week’s GOP-led report, Hutchinson’s attorney referred ABC News to a letter he sent to Loudermilk in January in which he wrote, in part, that Hutchinson “has and will continue to tell the truth.”
“Ms. Hutchinson will not succumb to a pressure campaign from those who seek to silence her and influence her testimony, even when done in the name of ‘oversight,'” her lawyer wrote.
As the 2024 general election ramps up — some seven months away — Trump has recently made multiple headlines during his campaign appearances.
A Saturday rally in Ohio was kicked off by him praising the people who have been jailed for their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6, calling them “hostages.”
Later in his speech, while talking about the need to protect American auto workers, Trump also warned there would be a broader “bloodbath” if he’s not reelected — sparking criticism from Biden.
A Biden campaign spokesperson said, in part, “This is who Donald Trump is: a loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience doubles down on his threats of political violence.”
Posting on his social media platform on Monday, Trump claimed that his “bloodbath” warning was “simply” about the potential challenges for auto workers if he’s not back in the White House to impose tariffs on China.
Trump’s campaign also capitalized on the controversy, with a fundraising email sent on Monday insisting that his political opponents and others had “viciously” misquoted him as part of a broader effort to “keep control.”
Trump’s praise of his supporters — even those whom prosecutors say participated in Jan. 6 — has been a central theme of his campaign as he vows to “free” people convicted for their roles that day as one of his first acts as president should he be reelected.
His rhetoric on the trail about his political opponents being “vermin” and migrants who come into the country illegally “poisoning the blood of” America has further alarmed some critics and experts who note it parallels the words of dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Trump has denied any intentional link.
He has also campaigned, in part, on a message of retribution for his voters, suggesting he will help them get revenge on a federal government that he says targets conservatives like him unfairly.
“This is the final battle. … Either they win or we win,” he said last year.
More recently, he has said, “Our ultimate retribution is success.”
During his radio interview on Monday with Gorka, Trump defended his “bloodbath” language and made more incendiary statements about Jewish Democrats, contending that they should be “ashamed of themselves” — echoing comments he has made in the past.
“If you vote for a Democrat, you’re being disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel,” he said in 2019.
Those comments invoked the antisemitic trope of “dual loyalty”: that Jews can’t be trusted because of their faith and must first have loyalty to something other than their country.
Elsewhere in the interview with Gorka on Monday, while attacking Biden’s policies, Trump argued that the backlash he’s been facing over “bloodbath” is a part of his political opponents’ efforts to “cheat” in the 2024 election, making unfounded claims that his opponents have used the term more often.
“We’re getting ripped off with Biden’s really dumb auto policy,” he said.
Trump claimed, too, that any auto workers who vote against him are “not the smartest people.”
Trump later said Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats — amid Israel’s war against Hamas and other tensions in the Middle East — “hate” their religion and Israel and that they “should be ashamed of themselves.”
“I actually think they hate Israel. Yes,” he said.
“Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he said. “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”
Biden’s campaign quickly slammed that statement, saying in their own that “the only person who should be ashamed here is Donald Trump.”
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