Rep. Liz Cheney’s career as a congresswoman will likely be ending soon, and she seems determined to go down swinging like a lunatic at Trump. The Wyoming congresswoman believes that President Trump was “personally involved” with the January 6 Capitol riot.
As the January 6 Committee attempts its blatantly partisan investigation, it has faced resistance from Trump and his allies. Steve Bannon and other Trump advisors are refusing to comply with a subpoena, and he and Trump are also exerting executive privilege over documents being sought by the committee.
This, Cheney suggests without any evidence, signifies that “President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6,” and she insists that the committee will “get to the bottom of that.”
Cheney’s conclusion is not only absurd but also contradicts a previous FBI investigation that failed to find evidence that the Capitol riot was coordinated — let alone personally “planned and executed” by the Trump White House.
“The FBI has so far found no evidence that [President Trump] or people directly around him were involved in organizing the violence, according to the four current and former law enforcement officials,” reported Reuters back in August. Congress was briefed on the investigation.
As for the assertion of executive privilege, there’s ample justification for it. Trump filed a lawsuit to stop the committee’s attempts to access records from his administration. The lawsuit accuses the partisan committee of members handpicked by Pelosi of “harass[ing] President Trump and senior members of his administration (among others) by sending an illegal, unfounded, and overbroad records request to the Archivist of the United States,” with a request that is “limitless in scope” seeking “records with no reasonable connection” to the events of January 6.
Related: January 6 Update: Five Things You Might Have Missed
The lawsuit says that the committee is seeking access to “potentially millions of presidential records” which contain “information within the scope of various components of executive privilege, including but not limited to the presidential-communications, deliberative-process, attorney-client, and attorney-work-product privileges, and which include law enforcement information, national security information, and information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
Trump’s legal team asserts that the requests by the committee don’t serve any “legitimate legislative purpose,” and that the request is “not just overly broad, it requests documents including campaign polling data.”
The lawsuit also challenges whether a sitting administration has the authority to waive executive privilege for the preceding administration. “An incumbent administration does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally waive the executive privilege of a previous administration — especially one so recent,” Trump’s team points out. “If it did, then executive privilege doesn’t exist, including for Joe Biden.”
To people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, like Liz Cheney, that doesn’t matter.
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