At the opening of this Tuesday afternoon’s public hearing of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) spotlighted the responsibility held by Donald Trump for pushing ahead with his efforts to overturn the election despite the total lack of evidence for his fraud claims.
Trump wasn’t simply unaware of the facts. He willfully ignored the details of what actually happened in the last election. During her opening remarks on Tuesday, Cheney also said the knowledge of being in the wrong extended to Trump’s legal team led by Rudy Giuliani. In other words, it seems unmistakably clear that Trump, Giuliani, and allies of theirs acted with corrupt intent, heading so far off into the metaphorical deep end that even Trump allies still in the administration after the election couldn’t find it in themselves to go along with it. Bill Barr — who’s not some kind of secret liberal! — was among those who consistently pushed back. As the Congresswoman explained it Tuesday:
‘We have covered significant ground over the past several weeks. And we have also seen a change in how witnesses and lawyers in the Trump orbit approach this committee. Initially, their strategy in some cases appeared to be to deny and delay. Today, there appears to be a general recognition that the committee has established key facts, including that virtually everyone close to President Trump — his Justice Department officials, his White House advisers, his White House counsel, his campaign — all told him the 2020 election was not stolen. This appears to have changed the strategy for defending Donald Trump.’
Cheney added that the argument from Trump’s side has turned into the notion he “was manipulated by others outside the administration, that he was persuaded to ignore his closest advisers, and that he was incapable of telling right from wrong… This of course is nonsense. President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.” Trump was not in a position to somehow be reasonably said to have been in the dark about the well-documented security of the last presidential election, Cheney explained on Tuesday. “No rational or sane man in his position could disregard that information [about the integrity of the election] and reach the opposite conclusion, and Donald Trump can not escape responsibility by being willfully blind,” Cheney added.
“You will see evidence that Trump’s legal team, led by Rudy Giuliani, knew that they lacked actual evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to prove that the election was actually stolen. They knew it,” Cheney also explained, previewing the Tuesday afternoon hearing. Reporter Hugo Lowell remarked that Cheney “is clearly trying to preemptively undercut Trump’s defences should DOJ prosecute him — using legal term “willful blindness” to say Trump cannot claim he truly thought the 2020 election was stolen when he pushed to overturn the results.” During the Tuesday hearing, in-person witnesses included a former spokesperson for the Oath Keepers and a Capitol riot participant. The committee also shared clips of former White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s recent testimony. Check out Cheney’s comments below:
