Should Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson be in prison for trying to frame Donald Trump for a crime he didn’t commit? Of course, they should. It will never happen, as their defenders will deflect any attempt to bring them to justice for their partisan witch hunt by claiming that holding them accountable is the real partisan witch hunt. Nevertheless, they’ve committed an enormous crime, and Donald Trump just called them out for it.
Old Joe Biden wasn’t just the worst president in American history; he was something even worse than that. He was the first chief executive to weaponize the engines of government against his political opponents. He was the first American president to corrupt the justice system and further the corruption of his own political party and the establishment media in pursuit of the destruction of his foremost political foe. He was the first (although some would say the second) president to place the continued existence of America as a free society in serious doubt. He did not, however, do all this alone. He had significant bipartisan help. Now Trump has said that two of Old Joe’s accomplices should be in prison. He is right, of course, but the predictable howls of outrage have already started.
In a "Meet the Press" interview that NBC broadcast on Sunday, Trump charged that as then-Rep. Cheney (R-Hate Trump), Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Hate Trump), and others tried to frame him as the traitorous ringleader of the left’s fictional Jan. 6 “insurrection,” Cheney “did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps. They deleted and destroyed all evidence. And Cheney was behind it. And so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail." Indeed.
In this, Trump didn’t say anything that the Committee on House Administration's Subcommittee on Oversight hadn’t said in a report on the Jan. 6 frame job. Rep. Barry Loudermilk, (R-Ga.) said: "For nearly two years, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's January 6th Select Committee promoted hearsay and cherry-picked information to promote its political goal – to legislatively prosecute former President Donald Trump." The report said that the Jan. 6 committee attempted "to promote a political narrative" and charged that it "deleted records and hid evidence" before Republicans gained a majority in the House in 2022.
Specifically, the report stated: "THE SELECT COMMITTEE DELETED RECORDS AND HID EVIDENCE - Reps. Thompson and Cheney failed to turn over video recordings of witness interviews and depositions despite using these recordings in their high-profile, primetime hearings. The Subcommittee recovered over one hundred deleted or password-protected files, including some files that were deleted days before Republicans took the majority. They also hid multiple transcribed interviews of witnesses who had firsthand knowledge of Trump‘s actions on January 6."
Despite all this evidence of malfeasance, however, Cheney dug down in response to Trump’s statement, claiming it was "a continuation of his assault on the rule of law." Cheney was actually the one who was engaged in an all-out assault on the rule of law, but it’s a tried and tested tactic of the left: accuse your enemy of what you yourself are guilty of doing.
Cheney went on to repeat the same old lies about Trump: "Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave."
The reality was that in Trump’s actual Jan. 6, 2021 speech, he told protestors: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” He did not mobilize “an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol,” and it is both defamatory and extraordinarily reckless of Cheney to repeat these lies.
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Like the Japanese soldiers found in the Philippine jungle in the 1970s, refusing to believe that World War II had ended, Cheney stuck to her lies, claiming that her fake Jan. 6 “insurrection” was "the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history. Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic." Yet Trump was right. Cheney and Thompson should be jailed because there were no “illegal and unconstitutional actions” committed, and Cheney had every reason to know that.
It won’t happen, but it should. We can only hope that someday there will be a strong and well-functioning justice system in America so that crimes on the magnitude of those Cheney and Thompson committed can indeed be prosecuted as they should be.
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