The outgoing GOP rep discusses the possibility of Mike Pence appearing before the January 6 committee.
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Hayes: We’ve talked before about when the turn came for you—it was the post-election period and it was, of course, January 6. When you look at what some of your Republican colleagues are doing, the ones who are reluctant to speak out. I think it’s a pretty big group. They don’t like Trump. They think he’s lying about the election. They think what he did between the election and January 6 was awful. And they hated what he did on January 6 and since, but they’re not saying that. And some of them are affirmatively saying, “Well, there were these election irregularities,” with sort of a wink and a nod. When you see that, is it more frustrating to you because you know what it was like to have to go along to get along? Because for your first four years, you were more critical than most, but you did defend him at times, you did avoid giving comments at times when you might have been expected to do that. Do you see that in them and you’re more easily able to recognize it?
Cheney: The way that I think about it is that there’s no defense post-January 6. And even if you go back and look at what he was doing in the third week of November, the fourth week of November. The first statement that I put out was around the third week of November when I was saying, “Look, if you have evidence of fraud, show it. Otherwise, the election is over and you have to respect the outcome of the election.” I think that once you get to a place where you see what he did and—I don’t understand how you can not see the danger. Some people don’t see the danger because they don’t want to. Some people don’t see the danger maybe because they really don’t know history. Maybe they really haven’t studied the rise of authoritarianism in other countries around the world. Maybe they really just tell themselves it can’t happen here. But we saw it happen. I can’t really explain why people are acting the way they’re acting.
Hayes: And you don’t buy the argument from some of these people who say: “Look I need to stay in my seat so in the future I can be a check on this”?
Cheney: No. Because at this point—and look, you can make the argument, and different people made different decisions, and you made a different decision obviously about completely opposing him and when to completely oppose him, but in my view it’s indefensible once he launches a violent assault on the Capitol.
Hayes: Speaking of that violence, last night in your speech you accused President Trump of willfully endangering the lives of FBI agents and deliberately stoking political violence more broadly—January 6, of course, but it sounded like you were talking about the things he’s saying and doing contemporaneously.
I’d make the argument that nobody is a bigger target than you are. Does that factor into your thinking about what to do next?
Cheney: I don’t think you can let it. I think what he’s doing now is—violence is a direct and foreseeable consequence of what he’s doing. I think it’s malicious when he releases the search warrant with the names of the FBI agents on it. When he reportedly has somebody call the Justice Department in a way that sounds very much like mafia tactics. All of that—it can’t be something that we accept in American politics.
Hayes: Former Vice President Pence said this morning that he’s open to talking to the January 6 committee if he’s invited. And there were some more [qualifications] around his answer but that’s more or less what he said. Are you going to invite him?
Cheney: I haven’t seen specifically what he’s said. We’ve had discussions with his attorneys previously and that was not his position, so I’m interested to see what he’s said now and see if there really has been some kind of change. Previously, his view has been that there were serious constitutional issues involved with having a vice president testify in front of Congress.
Hayes: (Reading Pence’s exact words) Pence said, “If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it. Any invitation that would be directed to me, I would have to reflect on the unique role I was serving in as vice president. It would be unprecedented in history for the vice president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill. But as I said, I don’t want to pre-judge. So if any formal invitation was rendered to us, we’d give it due consideration.”
Cheney: We’ll continue our engagement with his counsel and make a determination going forward about any conditions under which he would come and testify. I would point out that in fact you have had situations where, for example, in the aftermath of 9/11, you’ve had the president and the vice president testify to the 9/11 commission. After he granted Nixon’s pardon, President Ford testified before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. So there is actually precedent when you have a national crisis for presidents, vice presidents to testify. The 9/11 commission obviously was different—it wasn’t technically Congress. But certainly the subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was.
Vice President Pence played a critical role on that day. His comments in the aftermath have varied in terms of his willingness to talk about the seriousness of the crisis the nation faced—or in terms of his description of the seriousness of the crisis.
Hayes: Some of the people on his staff, the people who were with him, have provided pretty compelling firsthand testimony about what happened that day.
So, why don’t you just tell me everything you want to ask him.
Cheney: (laughter) Let me just pull up my notes.
Look, we’ve had very clear testimony from a number of individuals including testimony, for example, from Ivanka Trump’s aides about the vehemence and the anger that Donald Trump expressed towards Mike Pence on that phone call from the Oval Office. We have heard—the nation has heard—the reports that the vice president’s security detail thought that they were going to have to call their families because when the Capitol was under assault they thought they might not make it. And we know that President Trump never once tried to call Mike Pence to say, “Are you okay?” I think there’s a lot that Vice President Pence knows. I think that this is a situation where you do have serious constitutional issues in terms of executive privilege, but executive privilege is not an absolute immunity. And when you have the kind of dereliction of duty and likely crimes that were committed here I think everybody who was involved has a responsibility to tell the truth.
We’re also in a situation now where we know that a number of Vice President Pence’s staff have been subpoenaed and have testified in front of a grand jury. So I think there’s a lot more going on here than just the committee’s work.
Hayes: You mentioned “likely crimes.” There’s an argument—as we learn more about what President Trump has done, as the proceedings in Georgia seem more serious, as the Mar-a-Lago raid happens last week—there’s a growing argument, including by some who I wouldn’t describe as Trump supporters, that says: “We can’t prosecute him because what it would do to a country in a political situation as volatile as this moment is would be worse than punishing him—if he has committed crimes—worse than punishing him for crimes he has committed. Do you buy that argument?
Cheney: No. I think it’s just the opposite. And I touched on this a little bit in my speech last night. Obviously, the Department of Justice has to make a decision about whether they’ve got the evidence. I think the fact that Judge Carter says it’s more likely than not that two crimes were committed is significant. I think we’ve certainly provided significant evidence in our hearings. But if the Justice Department has the evidence and they make a determination not to prosecute, then it is essentially a signal that you are excusing the behavior, that you’re accepting it, that you’re legalizing it.
And I think that changes America forever.
If a president can ignore the rulings of the courts and can try to overturn an election, and call local officials and pressure them to find votes, send an armed mob to the Capitol—if a president can do all those things and face no legal consequences for it, then it is difficult to say we’re a nation of laws, and that really no one is above the law.
Hayes: This is not an exact parallel for a hundred reasons, but when you look back at the pardon that President Ford gave to Richard Nixon it was in part to start this process of healing. Would this in any way be akin to that? Would you favor President Biden doing something like that if the prosecution went forward?
Cheney: As you said, there are so many differences, but President Nixon resigned from office. And President Trump continues to do the things that he did that caused the violence on January 6. And so I think that’s a very big difference. I also think that what we’ve laid out in the hearings in terms of President Trump’s multipart plan to overturn the election is a far more significant threat to the Republic than Watergate was.
President Trump has expressed no remorse. In fact, when he himself says he’s going to pardon the people who were in the Capitol, when he himself says that the election was the insurrection, that’s a sign of how different the situation is and how dangerous the current one is.
Hayes: There are likely to be more hearings.
Cheney: Yes.
Hayes: Where does this go?
Cheney: So, we’re still in the process of interviewing a whole range of people including Cabinet officials. We just interviewed [then-Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo last week. We’re in the process of putting together what the topics will be in the hearings and the additional material we’ll cover. There’s obviously a lot more information about the Secret Service. More witnesses coming forward from inside the White House that day, on the 6th, more documents.
There’ll be additional hearings. I’m not sure how many, I’m not sure how we’ll frame what the topics are for each one, but we’ll have them.
Hayes: What did you learn from Pompeo?
Cheney: I can’t talk about that.
Hayes: On to politics. You told Savannah Guthrie this morning that you’re thinking about running for president. I think you could make a pretty good argument that your defeat last night is more evidence that the Republican Party is a very Trumpy party—not that that was particularly surprising. And you specifically spoke this morning about putting together a coalition of Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Are you considering running as an independent?
Cheney: Right now, I’m not focused on that. I’m not focused on the kind of horse-race specifics of it in that way.
Hayes: The Republican Party doesn’t seem like a very friendly place for you these days.
Cheney: Ummm—true. But I guess I think about it more in terms of the substance of what has to be done. And if I look at the next—obviously the time from now until January, and the work that’s got to be done on the select committee and my responsibilities as Wyoming’s representative until then. That sort of takes up how I’m thinking about the next several months. There’s also a lot of work that has to be done educating people around the country about why this matters so much. And so I’m not sitting here thinking about, okay, what does a run look like, am I going to run or not going to run? At some point you have to make that decision, but I look at it much more through the lens of preventing Donald Trump and I think that there’s—what we’ve seen in the last 18 months is a huge, not just the last 18 months, is a huge deficit in people’s real understanding of what it takes to make our system work. And so I want to do whatever I can do to help fix that.
Hayes: There’s a notable gap, really a gulf, between what you on the committee are hearing from these high-level Republicans who worked alongside Donald Trump and the seriousness of it all, and what rank-and-file Republican voters think, I think in part egged on by their elected representatives in the Republican Party.
Cheney: My opponent’s campaign here in Wyoming is a perfect example of that. Because you had the leadership of her campaign, people like [Trump’s White House political director and 2020 campaign manager] Bill Stepien and [Trump communications adviser] Tim Murtaugh—who testified to the committee under oath: The election wasn’t stolen, wasn’t rigged, we told Donald Trump. At least Stepien said he told Donald Trump. Murtaugh expressed significant concern about the fact that Donald Trump wouldn’t honor the law enforcement who were injured and killed that day.
Under oath, Stepien went so far as to say that there was “Team Normal” and “Team Crazy.” And Team Crazy were the ones that asserted that the election was stolen. And of course the person that he’s working with here in Wyoming is clearly on Team Crazy.
Hayes: And said directly that the election was rigged.
Cheney: Right. So that cognitive dissonance, I guess you’d call it, where under oath they tell the truth, it seems, but for political purposes candidates are willing to make these claims they know not to be true. There’s just such a difference between making that claim—making the claim that the president is illegitimate, that the election was stolen, Trump making that assertion and using it to get people to invade the Capitol—it’s a dereliction of duty by all of those people.
I think that people really do believe it. And people believe because politicians are lying to them.
Hayes: More than half of the Republican Party, right?
Cheney: Yeah, right.
Hayes: You have very high approval ratings from Democrats and independents.
Cheney: Did you ever think you would say that sentence?
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- Discussion
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Honor. Lots of people talk about it. Few have it. @Liz_Cheney is one of those few. https://t.co/qt6ZdsMque
— Klon Kitchen (@klonkitchen) August 18, 2022
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