Donald Trump is not yet in office, but his not-so-slow rolling train of political retaliation against his rivals has already left the station. After filing a lawsuit against an Iowa newspaper over its poll showing Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa, the president-elect has now endorsed an FBI probe into former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney over her work on the House Jan. 6 committee.
“Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that ‘numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI.’ Thank you to Congressman Barry Loudermilk on a job well done. Newsmax, by Greg Kelly,” Trump wrote early Wednesday morning on Truth Social.
On Tuesday, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), Chairman of the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight, released an interim report on the GOP’s counter-investigation into the Jan. 6 committee’s bipartisan investigation, which recommended criminal charges against Trump over his involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Loudermilk accused Cheney of having “colluded with ‘star witness’ Cassidy Hutchinson,” and recommended that she be “investigated for potential criminal witness tampering,” as a result.
Hutchinson — a former White House aide in the Trump administration — testified under oath to the committee that her Trump-connected lawyer, Stefan Passantino, advised her to mislead the committee about her recollections of events leading up to and on Jan. 6. Hutchinson ultimately dismissed Passantino days before her public testimony.
In a statement responding to Loudermilk, Cheney wrote that the interim report accusing her of witness tampering “intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did. Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth.”
“No reputable lawyer, legislator or judge would take this seriously,” she added.
But reputable lawyers are not the ones who may decide how to proceed under Trump’s second administration. Trump’s nominees to head the Department of Justice and the FBI — Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, respectively — are unwavering Trump loyalists who have openly expressed a desire to use federal enforcement bodies as a means to punish Trump’s opponents and critics.
In 2023, Bondi told Fox News that “the investigators will be investigated […] because the deep state — last term for President Trump — they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated and the house needs to be cleaned out.”
Patel, Trump’s FBI nominee, described Cheney as “the main architect” of alleged misinformation spread by the Jan. 6 committee in his book Government Gangsters, which contained a list of 60 other so-called “deep state” operatives he felt needed to be rooted out of public life.
A loyalist through and through, Patel could be taking his marching orders directly from Trump. Earlier this month, the president-elect told NBC News: “For what they did, honestly,” the lawmakers who sat on the Jan. 6 committee “should go to jail.”
