Dick Cheney Rips Republicans for ‘Failure to Defend the Constitution’: ‘Not Leadership That Resembles Any of the Folks I Knew’

Former Vice President Dick Cheney condemned fellow Republicans on Thursday as he attended a Jan. 6 address by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Asked by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl why he was in attendance, Cheney replied, “It is an important historical event. You can’t overestimate how important it is.”

“He told me that he is ‘deeply disappointed in the Republican leadership,'” Karl said of his conversation with Cheney. “And he was specifically talking about how they have handled the events of January 6th and the aftermath, and what he described as a failure to defend the Constitution.”

He reportedly added, “It’s not leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years.”

Cheney, 80, accompanied his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), at the event, making them the only Republicans in attendance. He has been mostly absent from the public eye since the end of his eight-year term as vice president in 2009, but his daughter traded barbs with former President Donald Trump through most of his term in the White House, voted to impeach him during his final days in office, and is one of just two Republicans serving on House Democrats’ committee tasked with investigating Jan. 6.

Liz Cheney has previously said her father is concerned with the state of the Republican Party. “My dad is deeply troubled about where our party is, deeply troubled about where the country is,” she said last year.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — who led Republicans in the Senate during the final two years of Cheney’s term in office — took aim at Democrats in a statement shortly before his remarks. “It is especially jaw-dropping to hear some Senate Democrats invoke the mob’s attempt to disrupt our country’s norms, rules, and institutions as a justification to discard our norms, rules, and institutions themselves,” McConnell said.

Watch above via Baltimore’s WMAR.

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