Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming Congresswoman who when in office until earlier this year was among the only Republicans on the rhetorical national stage willing to go against Trump on just about any major issue, particularly the 2020 election’s integrity, spoke out again this week.
Tucker Carlson, the infamous host on Fox News, has been running with what is essentially the narrative that the riot at the Capitol inspired by Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election wasn’t that bad. He’s been doing so based in significant part on access to tens of thousands of hours of footage of scenes around the Capitol complex — footage from which he’s drawn highly specific selections that, on their own, would seem to suggest a lack of widespread physical violence or the kind of existentially threatening behavior that’s been claimed. The problem is that he’s not focusing on the expansive evidence that’s available that documents violence.
Cheney, of course, was a leader of the House committee that investigated the Capitol riot, and in that role, she established her commitment to pursuing accountability against those responsible for the violence via lies about the election that gave the excuse. “If @HouseGOP wants new Jan 6 hearings, bring it on,” Cheney said. “Let’s replay every witness & all the evidence from last year. But this time, those members who sought pardons and/or hid from subpoenas should sit on the dais so they can be confronted on live TV with the unassailable evidence.” The list of Republicans in the House who defied subpoenas from the riot panel while it was active include Reps. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio), among others.
There has been some Republican condemnation for Carlson’s deceptive narrative, but there are also those — like the ex-president himself — running with it. Carlson is mishandling basic facts, though. He spotlighted how cops seemed sometimes not urgently interested in stopping individual rioters, but that’s not because this group, overall, wasn’t that threatening or reasonably perceived as guilty of criminal activity according to long set standards. Rather, as a different report from Fox News itself explained after Carlson started his show’s controversial broadcasts this week, cops were vastly outnumbered, and some law enforcement personnel pursued alternative tactics for crowd control rather than just arresting everybody — which they literally couldn’t have done because of limits to their resources. Tom Manger, the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, also pointed to these already well-documented facts in his own reaction to the approach Carlson took.
If @HouseGOP wants new Jan 6 hearings, bring it on. Let’s replay every witness & all the evidence from last year. But this time, those members who sought pardons and/or hid from subpoenas should sit on the dais so they can be confronted on live TV with the unassailable evidence.
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) March 8, 2023
