Liz Cheney is coming off of a massive defeat in Wyoming’s GOP primary election, and she is filled with emotion. It’s not directed at her loss though, it is focused on the aftermath of the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago.
Cheney said that she feels “disgusted.”
“I was ashamed to hear Republicans immediately and reflexively attack the FBI agents who executed the search warrant,” Cheney said in an exclusive interview with ABC News. “I was disgusted when I learned that President Trump had released the names of those agents, when he released the unredacted search warrant, and that has now caused violence.”
The raid in question took place on August 8, 2022, after Attorney General Merrick Garland initiated a search warrant that was approved by Judge Bruce Reinhart.
Advocates of Trump have organized to challenge those who were involved. They are questioning whether the raid was using politics as a weapon and supporting the president’s rights.
Since the raid, Reinhart has become a target of those who are responding to what they perceive as injustice.
Cheney vented her frustration with the backlash, “We’ve seen threats of violence, the judge himself, his synagogue had to cancel services because of threats of violence. This is a really dangerous moment and to see the former president of the United States, my colleagues stoking the flames of that instead of saying, ‘We need to learn the facts. We need to learn the evidence we need to learn the information about what happened … I think that the American people see what hypocrisy that is and it’s dangerous hypocrisy.”
This week a redacted version of the search warrant approved by Judge Reinhart was released to the public. He is being pushed by some to make the full document public, but he is also being criticized by others for making any of the contents visible to the public.
Some are afraid that more information that is released will ignite those who support Trump to lash out and possibly interfere with further investigation into the way that the former president handled documents.
According to a report by ABC News, “The Justice Department had urged the judge, Bruce Reinhart, to keep the affidavit fully under seal, arguing that if it were to be made public it could ’cause significant and irreparable damage’ to an ongoing criminal investigation involving highly classified materials related to national security.”
Cheney Taking Aim at Trump Following Election Loss & FBI Raid
Cheney has some words to say about this as well, “It sounds to me from watching the news reports that they’re acting responsibly in terms of determining what has to be redacted and, and what can be released. But it also seems to be the case that there were clearly ongoing efforts to get back wherever this information was, and that it was not presented, you know, that the former president was unwilling to give back these materials. Now, we will see, we’ll learn more.”
Cheney was asked about the influence that Trump had on her defeat in the election, and what that means for the Republican Party. She said that it means people still believe the lie that Trump’s telling and that it is very dangerous.
Cheney is not just focused on Trump now, since her loss in the primary, she is threatening to use whatever political power she still has to work against other leaders in her party who have embraced what she believes is Trump’s attack on democracy.
