Like the Media Research Center, WorldNetDaily hates Liz Cheney for failing to be a slavish Trump-bot. It amped up that hostility toward her with Capitol riot-related shenanigans. Bob Unruh wrote in an Oct. 20 article:
Liz Cheney, an ex-congresswoman from Wyoming tossed out of office by her own voters, was a key to the partisan committee ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created to try to find fault with President Donald Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, protest-turned-riot in Washington.
Cheney famously sided with Democrats in a long list of votes and actions against Trump, who was impeached twice – and acquitted twice – on charges created by Democrats.
She was a leader of that J6 committee, and evidence shows she tried to skew the evidence to suppress information that exonerated Trump.
And now a report by Just the News points out her committee actions were unethical, and may have been illegal.
That’s from the chief of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, who cited new evidence that Cheney communicated with a key Jan. 6 witness behind her lawyer’s back.
[…]The current committee’s review has uncovered encrypted Signal messages showing Cheney “directly and indirectly” communicated with Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness who became known for reversing her own testimony.
“Cheney did not notify or seek permission from Hutchinson’s defense counsel, which is unusual,” the report confirmed.
And it explained, “The communications are the latest in a string of concerns Loudermilk’s investigation has raised concerning the Democrat-run Jan. 6 Select Committee that finished its work in December 2022. His committee previously found that the select committee failed to preserve documents, data and video depositions from its investigation, including the video of Hutchinson’s testimony.”
Cheney’s contacts with Hutchinson, Loudermilk confirmed, undermine the integrity of the Democrat-led campaign against Trump.
The report explained, “Loudermilk said Cheney may have taken the risk to contact Hutchinson, without her lawyer Stefan Passantino’s knowledge, because her further testimony was essential to advance a preferred narrative about Jan. 6.”
Unruh failed to mention the reason this likely happened. As more reputable media outlets reported, Hutchinson has stated that Passantino — who was being paid for by Trump’s political action committee — told her to conveniently forget certain details about her testimony, which would make it reasonable that she did not want to loop him into her conversation. Ultimately, Hutchinson sought different legal representation.
When Loudermilk repeated his claims in a committee report, Unruh was there to document it in a Dec. 17 article:
A new congressional report is calling for an FBI investigation of former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney over her behavior that “likely” violated federal law during ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s partisan investigation into the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6. 2021.
Cheney is suspected of tampering with a witness who appeared before that special committee, which essentially took evidence about that day and put it in a report that blamed President Trump for everything, even to the point of leaving out details that exonerated him.
Just the News indicates a report from the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee, and chairman Barry Loudermilk, was released and concluded the riot was preventable.
It also seeks a formal criminal investigation of Cheney for “tampering” with a committee witness.
Because Unruh didn’t bother to fact-check anything he copied from the right-wingers at Just the News, one has to go to a real news organization — which called Loudermilk’s claims “flimsy to the point of transparency” — to fill the gaps and tell the full truth:
The report from Loudermilk’s subcommittee twists Cheney’s role into criminal activity in two ways. The first is that her interactions with Hutchinson are described as “tampering,” citing federal witness-tampering statutes. But those are focused on inhibiting testimony (particularly through force), not on enabling it. What’s more, the report’s important claim that Hutchinson retained [Jody] Hunt and [Bill] Jordan “at the recommendation of Representative Cheney” ignores the nuances of the interactions both women describe in their respective books.
Much of Loudermilk’s report centers on discrepancies between Hutchinson’s testimony and the testimony of others, discrepancies that are often in part because (as Hutchinson always represented) her testimony included secondhand information. But because the subcommittee presents Hutchinson’s testimony as intentionally false, the second recommended charge against Cheney proposes that she intentionally orchestrated Hutchinson’s testimony so that the witness could provide that false information.
[…]Trump sent his Capitol Hill allies an unsubtle signal: Cheney must pay, even beyond her Trump-orchestrated ouster from the House. Loudermilk and his subcommittee were no doubt cognizant of that signal when they upgraded their allegations against Cheney from ethical to legal ones. And now Trump’s incoming FBI director has a trivial predicate, in case he even sought one, to start the fishing expedition that Loudermilk and Trump endorse.
Unruh repeated some of this in a Jan. 2 article complaining that President Biden gave Cheney a medal:
It was his decision to give Liz Cheney a Presidential Citizen medal even though there are those in Trump’s incoming administration and high up in Congress, as well as a majority of Americans, who suggest she should be investigated by the FBI for possible criminal charges.
The Daily Mail reported Cheney, who represented Wyoming in Congress until she turned on Trump during his first term and her voters promptly gave her primary opponent a landslip victory, is among 20 picked by Biden to be given the special honor.
Cheney, along with the other leader of the anti-Trump January 6 investigation committee, set up in a partisan fashion then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Bennie Thompson are being honored for their “investigation” of those events.
[…]Biden’s decision to honor Cheney was “pathetic,” according to senior Trump adviser Jason Miller.
“With attacks happening in the United States and around the world, THIS is how Biden is spending his time today?” Miller wrote on X. He cited the two terror attacks on America on New Year’s Day, which together left 16 dead and dozens injured.
Unruh somehow managed to restrain from repeating his bogus attacks on Cheney.