Former GOP Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming is still pushing back against conspiracy theories involving the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and investigative responses to it.
On X, the platform formerly called Twitter, Cheney condemned on Saturday the idea that Trump really had pushed for 10,000 National Guard troops to handle security in Washington, D.C., around the time of what became the Capitol attack. As the pro-Trump crowd’s story goes, Trump’s ambitions were thwarted by officials including D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), then the Speaker of the House.
Right-wing media figure Mark Levin posted a link to conservative media coverage of supposedly exonerating evidence for Trump on the National Guard claims: details from discussions between former Secret Service official Anthony Ornato and the House committee that investigated January 6 in which Ornato claimed he’d heard the suggestion of that many National Guard personnel. This description is not the same thing as the claim that Trump ordered or somehow directed that kind of deployment and was blocked from seeing the plans fulfilled.
“Hi Mark: I see you’re still spreading BS. You & the bozo who wrote this might want to actually read the 1/6 report (eg, Appendix 2, 741-2, 127-8, 587-92), SecDef Miller’s transcript (Trump never ordered 10k troops), Judge Wallace’s finding (Kash Patel is “not a credible witness”),” Cheney replied to Levin.
The conservatives pushing the idea drawn from Ornato’s testimony that the 10,000 National Guard troops claim was actually legitimate have failed to explain why his remarks are automatically more trustworthy than pieces of evidence from elsewhere countering that narrative, assuming Ornato’s account is taken to legitimately back the claims from Trump about trying to secure that extensive of a security force. And there’s much more, anyway. Trump publicly started offering evident attempts at an excuse for the Capitol violence that very day, writing on social media that the Capitol attack represented merely the “things and events” that happen when an election is stolen, which didn’t happen.
