Outgoing Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney claimed on Monday night that a Republican colleague of hers called Donald Trump ‘orange Jesus’ even as he signed a form formally objecting to the ex-president’s election loss.
The ousted conservative Trump critic recalled it happening in the GOP cloak room hours before the former president’s supporters stormed the US Capitol to stop lawmakers from certifying his defeat.
‘I was working on my remarks, I was supposed to speak that day and there were sheets of paper laid out on the desks. And I asked one of the staffers in the cloakroom, “what are these sheets of paper?” Because members were coming in and signing them,’ Cheney said.
The staffer told her they were objection sheets for whoever wanted to sign up to oppose President Joe Biden‘s victory. Only one objection is required, but Cheney said ‘there were so many who wanted to show they were objecting that they’d set up these sign-up sheets in the cloakroom.’
‘As I was sitting there, a member came in and he signed his name on each one of the state’s sheets. And then he said under his breath, “The things we do for the Orange Jesus.” And I thought, you know, you’re taking an act that is unconstitutional,’ Cheney said.
The conservative lawmaker was ostracized from her own party for her criticism of Trump following the US Capitol riot last year and her work investigating him via the January 6 committee.
Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney tore into her soon-to-be-former House GOP colleagues for their enduring loyalty to Trump in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Monday night
She lost her primary race to a Trump-backed challenger in August.
Cheney tore into her soon-to-be-former colleagues on Monday night, accusing them of treating the former president ‘as though he were a king’ and painting their enduring loyalty as a threat to democracy.
‘The elected leaders of the Republican Party downplay the violence of January 6, and they demand that all others do the same. This has become a litmus test,’ she said in a shot at her former allies’ support for her primary opponent.
‘It’s as if the hundreds of serious injuries to Capitol police officers who defended our Capitol that day were inconsequential.’
She added that ‘Mike Pence was essentially the president for most of the day.’
Cheney also condemned Trump and his supporters’ verbal attacks on federal law enforcement in the wake of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, where agents reportedly retrieved highly classified documents that were not meant to leave a secure facility.
As over the Capitol riot, Cheney has been one of the few Republicans openly criticizing Trump for his handling of classified documents – which the Justice Department suggests could possibly be in violation of the Espionage Act and other criminal statutes.
She said that elected Republicans are treating the former president ‘as though he were a king’
‘[T]hose who are protecting Donald Trump, elected leaders of my party, are now willing to condemn FBI agents, Department of Justice officials, and pretend that taking top secret…documents and keeping them in a desk drawer, in an office in Mar-a-Lago or in an unsecured location, anywhere, was somehow not a problem,’ Cheney said.
‘They are attempting to excuse this behavior. They’re attempting to say that it was normal, that it was a storage issue,’ she continued.
‘And apparently, the Department of Justice has evidence that Donald Trump lied about having these documents, and he lied repeatedly. This has now become excusable too, if you judge by the actions of elected officials in my party.’
She warned that GOP lawmakers unconditional embrace of Trump could gradually ‘erode the rule of law.’
‘We are to this day living through the impact of a president who has abandoned his oath,’ Cheney pressed.
‘And we must be clear, in this time of testing, at this time of challenge, that when men and women in positions of public trust defend the indefensible, and make excuses for Donald Trump, they compromise the principles of our democratic republic.’
She added, ‘Each individual compromise to defend the conduct of one man, incrementally changes that republic.’