Liz Cheney: January 6th Commission ‘Threatens People In My Party Who May Have Been Playing a Role’

Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said her Republican colleagues feel “threatened” by the idea of a Congressional commission to investigate the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Cheney gave an interview to NBC’s Savannah Guthrie shortly after the House GOP ousted her as their conference chairwoman because she refuses to fall in line behind former President Donald Trump and his 2020 election lies. The vote was a dramatic shift from a previous vote that failed to oust Cheney, so when Guthrie asked her “what changed” since then, Cheney answered “for reasons that I don’t understand, leaders in my party have decided to embrace the former president who launched that attack.”

“This isn’t about looking backwards,” Cheney said. “This is about the real-time, current potential damage that he’s doing, that he continues to do.”

“Some of your colleagues say though we supported you before Congresswoman Cheney, you made your point, now drop it, let’s focus on the future,” Guthrie said.

“Well it is an ongoing threat, so silence is not an option,” Cheney countered.

Guthrie moved on by asking Cheney what she thinks was the “last straw” that lost her the support of her caucus. Cheney answered by calling for a return to substantive debates between Democrats and Republicans, but after that, she added “I also think that there is real concern among a number of members of my own party about a January 6th commission.”

I’ve been very public that that commission needs to be bipartisan. It needs to look only at January 6th and the events leading up to it, not at the BLM and Antifa riots last summer. And I think that that kind of intense, narrow focus threatens people in my party who may have been playing a role they should not have been playing.

When asked if she thinks the commission would find members of Congress “complicit” in the Capitol insurrection, Cheney declined to go that far, but “each time we have something happen in this country that is that kind of a crisis we have a commission, and there is no reason why there should be any resistance to doing so in this case.”

Watch above, via NBC.