WASHINGTON — A Republican chairman said Tuesday that the FBI should investigate former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., over her involvement in the probe from the last Congress of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, the former Vice Chair of the January 6 Select Committee, and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” said an interim report released by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who chairs the House Administration’s oversight subcommittee, which investigated the Jan. 6 select committee.
The report alleged Republicans found evidence showing Cheney “tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without her attorney’s knowledge.”
“This secret communication with a witness is improper,” the report said.
In addition, the report said the FBI should investigate Cheney for allegedly violating a law that prohibits any person from procuring another person to commit perjury, which Republicans have accused Hutchinson of doing in her testimony to the committee.
The report accused Cheney of helping Hutchinson attain new counsel; while the report alleges they spoke directly to each other without a lawyer’s knowledge, it indicated Republicans don’t seem to know what they discussed.
Cheney said in a statement in response to the report that Jan. 6 showed Trump for who he really is, “a cruel and vindictive man who allowed violent attacks to continue against our Capitol and law enforcement officers while he watched television and refused for hours to instruct his supporters to stand down and leave.”
The select committee’s 10 public hearings and final report featured numerous Republican witnesses, including many senior officials from the Trump White House, campaign and administration, Cheney noted in the statement. Their testimony was laid out in thousands of pages of transcripts and a “highly detailed and meticulously sourced” 800-page report that were made public and whose conclusions the Department of Justice had also reached in a separate investigation, she said.
Loudermilk’s interim report “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,” she alleged. “Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth.”
Hutchinson’s lawyer, William H. Jordan, said in a statement that the allegations that Hutchinson colluded with Cheney “are preposterous.”
“Ms. Hutchinson made the independent decision to part ways with her Trump-funded lawyer, freeing her to provide candid, truthful, and honorable testimony to the January 6th Committee about the attack on the Capitol, alongside dozens of Republican witnesses and law enforcement officers,” he said. “Despite baseless attacks by men with their own agendas to discredit her, Ms. Hutchinson stands by her testimony and remains committed to the truth and accountability.”
Reacting to the report Wednesday, Trump said on Truth Social that Cheney “could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee.”
The president-elect recently suggested in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that the members of the Jan. 6 panel should be imprisoned. Those former members, including its Democratic chairman, have said the committee did nothing wrong and did not violate the law.
Hutchinson was considered a star witness for the Jan. 6 committee which was formed in the last Congress under the House Democratic majority and included two Republicans: Cheney, who was the vice chair, and then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois. Hutchinson, a close aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified both privately and publicly to the committee about her knowledge of the lead-up Jan. 6 and what unfolded that day.
Hutchinson testified that she was told by White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato that after Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally at the White House ellipse, Trump insisted to the Secret Service that he go to the Capitol where he had encouraged his supporters to go afterward. Hutchinson testified that she was told Trump cursed at his security guards after being told they couldn’t go to the Capitol, grabbed for the steering wheel of his SUV from the back seat, and then reached for the “clavicles” of Bobby Engel, Trump’s head of security, who eventually relayed his account to Ornato.
Ornato later told the committee that he did not recall the conversation Hutchinson said they had with Engel.
While Republicans say there have been witnesses who have disputed Hutchinson’s account, it has also been corroborated by others.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
