Republicans come for Liz Cheney: Trump's allies in Congress set the stage for political prosecutions

That the incoming Trump administration will go after its political enemies, using all levers of state power to intimidate and persecute those who previously sought to hold the president-elect accountable, can no longer be portrayed as hysterical speculation, nor as something that would surely be opposed by cooler heads in a Republican-led Congress.

Donald Trump ran as the candidate of “revenge” and "retribution," filling his meandering campaign speeches with complaints about those who had investigated him over his connections with Russia and incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Anyone hoping an electoral victory would spur a change in heart — as opposed to justifying, in his mind, a national campaign to repair his narcissistic injuries — was dispelled of that notion this week.

“Numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney,” the GOP-led House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight claimed in a 128-page report on the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot. It's effectively a MAGA whitewash of that day’s events, Republican investigators finding more fault with one of their party's former leaders than with the president who told his followers to “fight like hell” and then watched them do so from the safety of the White House. Indeed, the report’s first four “top findings” all have to do with Cheney, not Trump or anyone else who opposed the peaceful transfer of power.

Cheney, after all, is a traitor: She voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 while serving in House GOP leadership. A self-styled “constitutional conservative,” she only broke with the president-elect and his party after he tried to end American democracy, going on to serve as co-chair of the special committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. For that — the crime of disloyalty — she is being set up for punishment.

Specifically, the committee led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., a Trump loyalist, charges the former Wyoming Republican with supposed “witness tampering,” accusing her of convincing Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House aide, to jettison her previous Trump-friendly testimony and tell the truth about what she heard and saw the day that her boss tried to overturn an election (like the president responding to chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” by saying that his former running mate “deserves” it). In the upside-down version of events proffered by congressional Republicans, the crime here was convincing another former MAGA ally to come clean.

“These violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the Loudermilk report concludes.

Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, has already signaled, repeatedly, that he would be willing to do so. In a 2023 interview with Steve Bannon, Patel promised that he would “go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” who contributed to Trump’s loss in 2020; in a book published the next year, he provided an actual list of “deep state” players heaccused of criminal corruption.

Trump, who earlier this month said that Cheney and others who investigated him “should go to jail,” all but gave Patel his marching orders in a Thursday morning post on his website, Truth Social, reaffirming the fact that his November victory has not caused a fundamental change in his character or desire to punish those who crossed him.

“Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee,” Trump wrote, citing the report’s line about laws “likely broken” by one of his leading critics. The post came hours after Trump’s legal team filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer, arguing that their November survey — which falsely suggested Vice President Kamala Harris would win Iowa — constituted “election interference,” demonstrating the president-elect’s intent to pair his campaign rhetoric with real-world legal actions (boosted by Disney and ABC News' decision to gift him $15 million rather than fight over whether "rape" and "sexual abuse" are the same thing).

Cheney, reportedly being considered for a preemptive pardon from President Joe Biden, responded with defiance in a statement on Tuesday.

“January 6th showed Donald Trump for who [he] really is — a cruel and vindictive man who allowed violent attacks to continue against the Capitol and law enforcement officers while he watched television and refused for hours to instruct his supporters to stand down and leave,” she said. As for the criminal allegations made against here: “No reputable lawyer, legislator or judge would take this seriously.”

Come next year, however, the question is: How many reputable lawyers, legislators and judges will we have left in government — and how many be willing to stand up to the president of the United States? Cheney is at least on the path to finding out.