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    Liz Cheney vs. MAGA

    The regular conference meetings of the Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, held most weeks behind closed doors in the Capitol Visitor Center, tend to be predictable and thus irregularly attended affairs. The party leaders — the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the minority whip Steve Scalise and the conference chairwoman Liz Cheney, whose job it is to run these meetings — typically begin with a few housekeeping matters and then proceed with a discussion of the party’s message or issue du jour. The conference’s more voluble members line up at the microphone to opine for one to two minutes at a time; the rare newsworthy comment is often leaked and memorialized on Twitter seconds after it is uttered. An hour or so later, the members file out into the corridors of the Capitol and back to their offices, a few of them lingering to talk to reporters.The conference meeting on the afternoon of Feb. 3 was different in nearly every way. It lasted four hours and nearly all of the G.O.P.’s 210 House members attended. Its stated purpose was to decide whether to remove Cheney from her leadership position.Three weeks earlier, Cheney announced that she would vote to impeach President Donald Trump over his encouragement of his supporters’ storming the Capitol on Jan. 6 — one of only 10 House Republicans to do so and the only member of the party’s leadership. Because her colleagues had elected Cheney to the party’s third-highest position in the House, her words were generally seen as expressing the will of the conference, and those words had been extremely clear: “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” she said.The combination of her stature and her unequivocal stand amounted to a clear message from Cheney to House Republicans: If they sided with Trump in challenging the election, they were siding against the Constitution, and against at least one of their elected leaders. The tenor of the Feb. 3 meeting was therefore tense, portentous and deeply personal from beginning to end, according to several attendees who later described it to me.When it was Cheney’s turn to speak, the 54-year-old Wyoming congresswoman began by describing her lifelong reverence for the House, where her father, Dick Cheney, was minority whip more than 30 years ago before serving as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense and George W. Bush’s vice president. But, Cheney went on, she was “deeply, deeply concerned about where our party is headed.” Its core principles — limited government, low taxes, a strong national defense — were being overshadowed by darker forces. “We cannot become the party of QAnon,” she said. “We cannot become the party of Holocaust denial. We cannot become the party of white supremacy. We all watched in horror what happened on Jan. 6.”Cheney, alone among House Republicans, had been mentioned by Trump in his speech that day. “The Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them,” he told his supporters at the Ellipse shortly before they overran the Capitol. The president had been infuriated by Cheney’s public insistence that Trump’s court challenges to state election results were unpersuasive and that he needed to respect “the sanctity of our electoral process.” At the time of Trump’s speech, Cheney was in the House cloakroom awaiting the ritual state-by-state tabulation of electoral votes. Her father called her to inform her of Trump’s remark. Less than an hour later, a mob was banging against the doors of the House chamber.In the conference meeting, Cheney said that she stood by her vote to impeach Trump. Several members had asked her to apologize, but, she said, “I cannot do that.”The line to the microphone was extraordinarily long. At least half of the speakers indicated that they would vote to remove Cheney. Ralph Norman of South Carolina expressed disappointment in her vote. “But the other thing that bothers me, Liz,” he went on, “is your attitude. You’ve got a defiant attitude.” John Rutherford of Florida, a former sheriff, accused the chairwoman of not being a “team player.”Others argued that her announcement a day before the impeachment vote had given the Democrats a talking point to use against the rest of the Republican conference. (“Good for her for honoring her oath of office,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointedly remarked when told of Cheney’s intentions.) Likening the situation to a football game, Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania lamented, “You look up into the stands and see your girlfriend on the opposition’s side — that’s one hell of a tough thing to swallow.”“She’s not your girlfriend!” a female colleague yelled out. Kelly’s remark was immediately disseminated among Republican women in professional Washington, according to Barbara Comstock, who served as a Republican congresswoman from Virginia until 2019. “We emailed that around, just horrified, commenting in real time,” she told me.Throughout it all, Cheney sat implacably — “as emotional as algebra,” as one attendee later told me. She spoke only when asked a direct question. But when McCarthy concluded by suggesting that they put this matter behind them and adjourn, Cheney insisted that the conference vote on her status right then and there. The members cast their secret ballots, and Cheney prevailed, 145 to 61.The lopsided margin was almost identical to Cheney’s own whip count going into the conference. Individual colleagues had confided in her that most of the conference was only too happy to move on from Trump — but saying so in public was another matter. To do so meant risking defeat at the hands of a Trump-adoring Republican primary electorate or even, many of them feared, the well-being of their families. In sum, it risked getting the Liz Cheney treatment. That Cheney was willing to face Trump’s wrath called attention to the fact that most of them were not — a factor in the aggrievement directed at Cheney in the meeting. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania said that Cheney had “a low E.Q.,” or emotional quotient. On his way out the door, one congressman remarked, “I just got to spend four hours listening to a bunch of men complain to a woman that she doesn’t take their emotions into account.”To the one-third of the conference who wanted her removed from the leadership position, Cheney offered no gesture of appeasement. Standing outside the Visitor Center conference room, Cheney described the vote to reporters as “a very resounding acknowledgment that we can move forward together.” But this was true in only the most limited sense. A clear fracture in the G.O.P. — between those who continued to view Trump as the party leader and those, now led by Cheney, who wanted to move past him and his presidency — went unaddressed. As for Cheney, who had until recently been viewed as a potential rival of McCarthy for the title of House party leader, her standing, and with it her career, was far from a settled matter.“The conference voted to keep Liz in that position because we’ve got bigger fish to fry — fighting the Democrats, winning the next election — and this is a distraction from all that,” Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, who voted against Cheney in the meeting, later told me. But, he added, “I think there’s a huge disconnect with Liz and some others in the conference and the American people. She did have a conservative record. But then she became almost a Never Trumper. And I’ve been disappointed in her lack of humility. It’s struck a lot of people as not only odd, but just as — wow.”Illustrations by Clay RoderyLiz Cheney became a federal officeholder at the same time Donald Trump did, in January 2017. In the wishful thinking of Republican leaders, her election seemed to offer a model for how the forces that Trump represented might be safely, and profitably, assimilated into the Republican establishment. The two of them were elected on similar platforms: anti-Obamacare, anti-environmental regulation, anti-gun control, anti-apologizing for protecting American interests around the world. During her 2016 campaign, Cheney described Hillary Clinton as a “felon” on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and, in response to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump bragged about groping women, she said in a statement to a Wyoming radio station, “Hillary’s actions have been far worse.”For his part, Trump appeared to understand Cheney’s stature within the Republican hierarchy. Her party connections extended across generations. She could pick up the phone and call current and former foreign leaders from around the world, particularly in the Middle East. She seemed, on occasion, a human link between the legacy of the last Republican administration and Trump’s own, despite their mutual lack of chumminess. Five days into Trump’s presidency, the congresswoman expressed her enthusiastic approval when Trump floated the possibility of bringing back waterboarding as an interrogation technique. Cheney later praised Trump for having issued a pardon to her father’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Cheney criticized Trump’s policies publicly on occasion but with discretion, and Trump rarely fired back.All that changed when Cheney stood alone among House Republican leaders in refusing to humor Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump won 70 percent of the vote in Wyoming in 2020, his highest share in any state. In Carbon County, the local party chairman, Joey Correnti IV, immediately convened two town halls to take the local temperature. “A few folks kind of let loose for a bit” over Cheney’s impeachment vote, he told me. “Talking about tar-and-feathering, riding her out on a rail. That kind of stuff.”Correnti drafted a resolution of censure — one of several against pro-impeachment lawmakers by Republican state committees in various states — that would soon be adopted by the entire state party. In it, the Wyoming G.O.P. called for her immediate resignation and asserted that Cheney had “violated the trust of her voters.” Several politicians announced their intentions to challenge her in the 2022 Republican primary. On Jan. 29, one of Cheney’s G.O.P. House colleagues, Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman and performative Trump ally, appeared on the State Capitol steps in Cheyenne, where he pronounced Cheney “a fake cowgirl” before posing for fan photos. (Gaetz had been invited by a 27-year-old freshman Wyoming state representative and food-truck entrepreneur, Ocean Andrew, a protégé of Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, whose distaste for the Cheneys dates back to the Iraq war.)On one level, this was a now-familiar story of Trump’s presidency and its aftermath: A Republican lawmaker, finally pushed over the line by one or another of Trump’s actions, publicly breaks with him, only to see years’ worth of alliances, friendships and ideological credibility evaporate overnight. But Cheney was not a backbencher, and she was not only standing on principle.According to sources who are familiar with Cheney’s views, she believes the G.O.P. has been manifestly weakened by Trump. The party now controls neither the executive nor the legislative branch. Twice in a row, Trump lost the popular vote by significant margins, exacerbating a worrisome trend for Republicans that has extended across five of the last six presidential elections. Given all this, Trump’s conduct in egging on the rioters presented his party with a political opportunity. By impeaching him, they could wash their hands of Trump and then resume the challenge of winning back majorities of the voting public.Cheney declined to speak to me on the record for this article, as did many other congressional Republicans. To defend Cheney is to invite the wrath of Trump and his base, while for those members who remain Trump loyalists, interaction of any sort with “fake news media” is increasingly to be avoided. But I was able to listen in on Cheney’s remarks at a virtual fund-raiser for her on Feb. 8, hosted by more than 50 veteran lobbyists who had each contributed to her political action committee. At the event, Cheney lamented the party’s drift away from reality, the extent to which it had become wedded to conspiracy theories. The party’s core voters, she said, “were misled into believing the election was stolen and were betrayed.” Alongside a legitimate concern over a Biden administration’s priorities was “the idea that the election somehow wasn’t over, and that somehow Jan. 6 would change things. People really believed it.”When one lobbyist raised the specter of Trump re-emerging as the G.O.P.’s dominant force, Cheney responded that the party would have to resist this. Citing the Capitol riot, she said, “In my view, we can’t go down the path of embracing the person who did this or excuse what happened.” She added: “We really can’t become the party of a cult of personality. It’s a really scary phenomenon we haven’t seen in this country before. Our oath and our loyalty is to the Constitution, not to an individual — particularly after what happened on Jan. 6.” This month, she told Fox News that she would not endorse Trump if he ran again in 2024.The House G.O.P.’s other two leaders, McCarthy and Scalise, do not subscribe to this view. Before Jan. 6, each man had strongly implied that the November election was rife with serious irregularities while dancing around Trump’s brazen claim that it had been stolen outright. Both of them, like many others in their conference, criticized Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6 while stopping short of describing it as impeachable.And both McCarthy and Scalise, according to associates familiar with their thinking, are of the view that the task of winning back the House next year is likelier to occur if the party’s relationship with Trump is harmonious. The same day Gaetz strutted into Cheyenne, McCarthy went to see Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The widely circulated photo of the two men standing and smiling together at the resort suggested that a path had been chosen for the party, and it was not Cheney’s.Still, many establishment Republicans have rallied around Cheney. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, publicly congratulated her on surviving the conference vote. “Liz’s primary is absolutely the most symbolic race in the country right now,” said Julie Conway, the executive director of the Republican women’s political action committee VIEW PAC. “She’s the proverbial canary in the coal mine. I mean, is the party ready to get back to principled leaders with substance and a moral compass? Or have we become a party that sees Congress as a source of entertainment and intellectual cotton candy?”Conway’s group hosted a virtual fund-raiser for Cheney just two hours before the Feb. 3 conference meeting. Its nearly 40 co-hosts included former Republican members of Congress — Comstock, Phil English and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — as well as alumni from the George W. Bush administration and prominent Washington lobbyists. Some of them cried as they talked about what the party had become under Trump. “It was like the biggest therapy session I’d ever been a part of,” said one of the hosts I spoke with later. Another host, the former Bush solicitor general Ted Olson, told me, “I’m very concerned about the direction the party’s being taken by — I hate to use the word ‘leadership,’ because outside of the courage Liz has shown, I’m not sure how you’d even define that term.”On Feb. 28, Trump gave the first speech of his post-presidency, at the annual CPAC convention in Orlando. After rattling off all the names of the seven Republican senators who had recently voted to convict him, along with the nine rank-and-file G.O.P. House members who had voted to impeach, the ex-president bore down on his primary target. “And of course, the warmonger, a person that loves seeing our troops fighting, Liz Cheney,” Trump declared to lavish boos. “How about that? The good news is in her state, she’s been censured, and in her state, her poll numbers have dropped faster than any human being I’ve ever seen. So hopefully they’ll get rid of her with the next election.”Though Cheney grew up in proximity to power, it wasn’t preordained that she would seek it herself. Raised in Wyoming and the Washington suburb of McLean, Va., she was a high school cheerleader and a babysitter of neighborhood kids. After graduating from Colorado College — the alma mater of her mother, Lynne Cheney — in 1988 she worked for USAID in Poland, Hungary and China before going to work on privatization efforts in the former Soviet Union at the State Department under Richard Armitage, who had served with her father at the Pentagon during the George H.W. Bush administration.Eight years later, when George W. Bush picked the elder Cheney as his running mate, Liz was put in charge of his debate preparation. “Liz didn’t hesitate to bust her dad’s chops,” said the Republican consultant and author Stuart Stevens, who assisted in the debate prep sessions at Dick Cheney’s home outside the resort town Jackson Hole. “We did these formal run-throughs where the Cheney women would grill him on his past record. ‘You voted against Martin Luther King Day — I mean, really, Dad? Really?’ It was clear that he was in this matriarchy.”Under the new administration, Liz Cheney went back to work at the State Department for Armitage, who had been named Colin Powell’s deputy secretary of state. Cheney reported directly to the assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, Bill Burns, who is now Biden’s C.I.A. director. Though Powell’s department and her father’s Office of the Vice President bitterly clashed over the decision to invade Iraq and other foreign-policy matters, Armitage recalled Liz Cheney as being “mission-oriented” and did not question her loyalty.‘A few folks kind of let loose for a bit, talking about tar-and-feathering, riding her out on a rail.’The criticisms over the Iraq war in general, and her father’s role in particular, seemed to colleagues to intensify Liz Cheney’s hawkishness. She co-wrote the former vice president’s distinctly unapologetic 2011 memoir, “In My Time,” and during Barack Obama’s presidency she appeared frequently on cable news and the Sunday shows to defend Bush’s belated troop surge as a success while excoriating Obama’s subsequent drawdown from Iraq. As a pundit, she developed an on-air persona that suggested a more energetic and cutting version of her father’s plain-faced certitude.By 2012, she and her husband, Phil Perry, were co-hosting House G.O.P. fund-raisers with her father in Jackson Hole — a clear-enough indicator of her own political aspirations. Her first campaign, an attempt to unseat the longtime Wyoming Republican senator Mike Enzi in 2014, was a bust, viewed even among her allies as a case of overshooting. Two years later, Cheney announced that she would run for the state’s lone House seat, soon to be vacated by the Republican Cynthia Lummis.Undaunted by accusations of carpetbagging, she leaned heavily on her family’s roots and Rolodex. She assured the state’s fossil-fuel industry that there was one war she did in fact stand against: Obama’s so-called war on coal. She vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and enact tort reform in its place. She labeled the Obama administration’s Common Core educational initiative a case of “big government interference” and promised to shred it. Most notably, she opposed same-sex marriage, despite the fact that her sister, Mary, was married to a woman.Cheney’s stridency on same-sex marriage, while infuriating her sister, also marked a rare difference in views from their father, whose support for the rights of gay couples stretched back over a decade. “To be for civil unions as a Republican in 2000,” as Cheney was, “was arguably disqualifying,” Stevens told me. “And Cheney made a big point of disclosing it to Bush. ‘This is what I believe, and I’m not going to change.’ And he didn’t care if that meant he wasn’t on the ticket.”Stevens added, “I think you can draw a direct line from what Dick Cheney said then to what Liz Cheney’s doing now.”Illustrations by Clay RoderyThe first sign of unresolvable differences between Cheney and Trump occurred over foreign policy. At a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2018, Cheney and other Republican members of Congress tried to dissuade President Trump from his plan to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan and Syria. A recurring theme in the “America First” platform on which Trump campaigned, and one of the few consistent themes in his foreign-policy views over the years, was that America had been mired in “endless wars” without adequate assistance from allies. These allies, he charged, also failed to pay their full NATO dues and in other ways played his presidential predecessors for suckers.Cheney believed with similar conviction that an American military presence in places like Afghanistan was necessary to combat terrorism. And from the beginning of Trump’s presidency, she had similarly objected to Trump’s apparent favoritism of Vladimir Putin over America’s NATO allies. Putting her objections in terms that she believed Trump would understand, she said to him in the White House: “I thought it was wrong for Barack Obama to withdraw troops for political reasons. And I think it would be wrong for you to do the same thing here.”Cheney was a member of the House Armed Services Committee who was seen by her colleagues as possessing an advanced political acumen, so much so that she was elected as the House G.O.P.’s conference chair at the end of 2018 despite having served only a single term. Such positions would, during previous presidencies, have given her standing to weigh in on matters like troop deployments. And to the extent that Republicans on the Hill did voice opposition to Trump, foreign policy was usually the safest ground on which to do so, because the president’s supporters tended not to get riled up over NATO contributions.Still, Cheney’s willingness to speak in such stern terms to Trump’s face contrasted sharply with the deference most of her colleagues showed to him. “In past Republican administrations, it was OK to speak up and disagree on things,” the former congresswoman Barbara Comstock told me. “That was Liz’s experience. These new ideologues, that’s not what they did. If you spoke up at the White House, they’d look at you like you were crazy. Trump would show up at conferences and point to different members and tell them how great they were on TV, and then they’d hang out at the White House.”Cheney remained enough of a Trump ally to lead the House G.O.P.’s messaging fight against Pelosi’s Democrats over the first impeachment of Trump for pressuring the new president of Ukraine to investigate Trump’s likely opponent in the presidential election, Joe Biden. She chided the Democrats for rushing the vote. “It’s a system and a process like we’ve never seen before, and it’s really disgraceful,” Cheney said during one TV appearance. Voting to impeach Trump under such circumstances “may permanently damage our republic,” she warned on the House floor.Even at the time, however, a distancing was palpable. Cheney conspicuously refrained from commenting on, much less explaining away or endorsing, Trump’s strong-arming efforts. She publicly criticized as “shameful” Republicans’ questioning the patriotism of Alexander Vindman, the Army officer and National Security Council staff member who testified in the inquiry.Still, it took the coronavirus pandemic to make permanent the gulf between Trump and Cheney. According to sources familiar with her thinking, it was not the president’s wholesale failure of empathy that she found wanting, but instead his rejection of science. The president’s cavalier prediction in February, that the virus was an ethereal blip that would pass “like a miracle,” disturbed her. Cheney’s father had suffered multiple heart attacks and was therefore at high risk if he contracted the virus. For this reason, she was a no-show at the House G.O.P.’s leadership meeting at St. Michaels, Md., in early March 2020.On May 12 of last year, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, incurred the wrath of Trump supporters by stating that the coronavirus would not simply “disappear” in the next few months as Trump had promised. Cheney publicly defended Fauci, tweeting that he was “one of the finest public servants we have ever had.” That was among the transgressions cited in a July virtual conference by members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, including Jim Jordan and Andy Biggs, as evidence that Cheney was out of step with the party. Their insistence on defending Trump’s obvious dereliction struck Cheney as further evidence that the Republican Party was in danger of losing its moorings.During a news conference on Sept. 23, Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transition should Biden win the election. “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” he replied, adding that “I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.” In response, Cheney tweeted the next day: “The peaceful transfer of power is enshrined in our Constitution and fundamental to the survival of our Republic. America’s leaders swear an oath to the Constitution. We will uphold that oath.”By “we,” the chairwoman seemed to be speaking for her entire conference — or more accurately speaking to them, stating in tersely Cheney-esque fashion that failing to follow her lead would place the republic in danger. Indeed, by this juncture only the most Pollyanna-ish of Republicans could fail to see that Trump would never concede defeat. His most zealous supporters joined him in forecasting a “rigged election”; others simply tried to dodge the implications for as long as possible.McCarthy, the minority leader, fell in the latter category. The day that Cheney tweeted her commitment to a peaceful transfer of power, McCarthy asserted during a briefing that the Democrats were likeliest to contest the outcome, adding, “There will be a smooth transition, and I believe President Trump will have a very good inaugural.”In December, well after the election results had clearly established Biden as the winner, numerous Republican elected officials refused to accept the outcome and began showing up at “Stop the Steal” rallies in swing states that went for Biden. Cheney produced a 21-page memo rebutting the “Stop the Steal” claims state by state and disseminated it on Jan. 3, hoping that it would sway fellow House Republicans to put the election and Trump behind them.It did not. On the evening of Jan. 6, hours after members of Congress had been ushered back into the House chamber under heavy security following the storming of the Capitol, Cheney voted to certify the election results. But the balance within the party had tilted far the other way. Newly elected members like Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina (who spoke at the Trump rally that morning) and Lauren Boebert of Colorado (who tweeted that morning, “Today is 1776”) had joined Freedom Caucus members like Jordan and Paul Gosar of Arizona in loudly contesting the results. Nearly two-thirds of the House Republicans voted to overturn them in at least one state.The censure passed by the central committee of the Wyoming Republican Party after Cheney’s impeachment vote, three weeks later, included a request that the congresswoman meet with the committee and explain her apostasies. Cheney did not. “She’s basically taken the attitude that the Republican Party isn’t something she needs to interact with,” Karl Allred, one of the committee members, told me. “I really hate that attitude.”The State Capitol building in Cheyenne opened in 1888, two years before Wyoming became America’s 44th state. It is ornate if strikingly pint-size, its walls covered with framed photos of bearded white throwbacks from a Wild West yesteryear. When I arrived there on a snowy morning in late March, the legislative session was reaching a fever pitch.Wyoming politics tend conservative and libertarian, shot through with an independent streak owed in large part to the state’s longstanding disgruntlement with the federal government’s influence there, which is extensive even by the standards of Western states. Nearly half of Wyoming’s land is federally owned, as are two-thirds of the mineral reserves that underwrite the state’s largest industry, energy production.Wyoming’s coal production exceeds that of any other state. But domestic demand for the fuel has been cut by more than a third over the past decade, primarily because of the cheap natural gas yielded from fracking. The shipping ports and rail lines that might send the coal to markets elsewhere are in blue states like Washington, Oregon and California, where climate-conscious lawmakers have passed laws banning coal transportation. To protect its hobbled industry, Wyoming legislators have attempted not-​entirely-conservative measures like taxing solar facilities and further regulating wind farms.All of this made the state particularly susceptible to Trump and the right-wing politics that have outlasted his presidency. The Republican Party has dominated Wyoming politics so thoroughly for so long that liberal policy victories are basically unheard of, so it was peculiar to find a legislative agenda crowded with measures tilting against a cultural and political moment that did not seem likely to arrive in Cheyenne anytime soon. One education bill, advanced by the Republican representative Jeremy Haroldson, would, as he described it, promote the view that “slavery was not maybe what it has been painted in the nation, completely.” A bill co-sponsored by a state senator and septic-pumping serviceman named Anthony Bouchard would allow the state’s conceal-carry gun permit to include out-of-state residents, though there had been no particular public outcry for such an extension.Bouchard was the first politician to announce his intention to challenge Cheney in the 2022 Republican primary. Another primary opponent, the state representative and conservative radio talk-show host Chuck Gray, happened to be speaking on the floor when I arrived in the chamber. Gray had introduced a statewide voter-ID bill, which passed the House and would later be signed into law despite the lack of evidence of its necessity (even the conservative Heritage Foundation has found only three isolated instances of individuals voting fraudulently in the state over the past two decades) or even strategic value (Republican candidates in the state rarely face serious challenges from Democrats).But the most noteworthy bill to be debated on the floor that day was a measure that would require a runoff in Wyoming primary elections if the top vote-getter failed to receive 50 percent. The bill, introduced by Senator Bo Biteman, was transparently clear in its purpose: to make it harder for Liz Cheney to prevail in 2022 over a crowded field splitting the anti-Cheney vote.Donald Trump Jr. and President Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had both commented positively on the bill, and Trump Jr. had been rumored among Wyoming Republicans as a possible Cheney challenger himself. Other exotic possibilities included the Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who owns a home in Wyoming, and the Rockefeller heiress and Florida socialite Catharine O’Neill, a columnist for the far-right online publication Newsmax and the daughter of a Trump donor, who filed paperwork in January suggesting her intentions to run in the state.As for Gray and Bouchard, “They’re probably dead in the water if the bill goes down,” Landon Brown, a Republican state representative from Cheyenne, told me in an office adjacent to the House floor. Hours later, the legislation did indeed fail to pass. Nevertheless, Brown said, Cheney is hardly a lock to win next year. “People like my parents, who loved all the Cheneys but are die-hard Trump supporters, will never vote for her again,” he said. “They can’t stand her.”“I love Donald Trump,” said Joey Correnti, the author of the original Cheney censure resolution, who told me that he went to considerable effort to have both his post-office box and the last four digits of his cellphone consist of the number 1776. “When he stood on that stage of 17 Republican candidates, I knew then that he’d be the only one who could drag America kicking and screaming through all the growing pains it needed to get to where we are now.”Still, Correnti acknowledged, Trump loyalty alone would not defeat Cheney. “Whoever does become the prime challenger to Cheney is going to have a hard, expensive road ahead,” he said. “So hopefully the people of Wyoming and Trump can come to an agreement.” Trump announced in a recent statement that he would soon be making an endorsement in the primary and warned against the risk of a crowded field, noting that “so many people are looking to run against Crazy Liz Cheney — but we only want one.” Already, Bouchard was angling to be Trump’s anointed candidate, posting MAGA sentiments on his Twitter page while describing Cheney in campaign emails as “DC Swamp Royalty.”The national party has affected a posture of studied neutrality on the prospect of a Republican leader being primaried by a Trump-endorsed opponent. The National Republican Congressional Committee “does not get involved in primaries,” Michael McAdams, the organization’s communications director, told me. But others in the party are rallying to Cheney’s defense. Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican congressman and frequent Trump critic who also voted for impeachment, recently started a political action committee of his own, Country First, that aims to support anti-Trump Republicans like Cheney. “She just has to get through this moment,” Kinzinger said. “Look, this whole cancel culture of the right, it’s about people who feel threatened because they look bad when someone like Liz is strong and actually stands for what she believes. I think she’ll survive.”Still, simply surviving as Wyoming’s lone congresswoman was not what anyone would have anticipated even a couple of years ago for Dick Cheney’s daughter. While reporting this article, it was jarring to recall all the expectations from the G.O.P. establishment and the Beltway press that attended her in her first days in the Capitol: the party’s first female House speaker or even its first female vice president or president. Almost no one I spoke with voiced such hopes for her today.One of her friends who served with her in the Bush administration, who asked not to be named while speaking candidly of his party’s internal dynamics, told me that he urged her to run last year for the seat that Mike Enzi was retiring from in the Senate, where Trump loyalty was less maniacally enforced. “I said to her, ‘You’ve got to run for the Senate — the House is becoming a terrible place,’” the friend recalled. “And that was well before all the impeachment stuff.” After Cheney’s vote, “there’s this cohort of House Republicans that can’t not attack her.”“Maybe that will subside and the Trump effect will wear off,” the friend went on. “But the history of politics doesn’t consist of two-year periods. These movements last 10 or 15 years. And that’s your whole career.”On a sunny Thursday morning in March, Cheney convened a news conference on the section of the eastern lawn of the Capitol complex known as the Triangle. She and about 30 other House Republicans, including McCarthy and Scalise, were there to discuss what a cardboard prop called “Biden’s Border Crisis.”Given the popularity of Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus bill and the continued progress of the vaccine rollouts, the Republicans were eager to change the subject. They were also eager to project a unity of purpose, to voice agreement on something — to be a whole and somewhat normal party again. Peter Meijer of Michigan and John Katko of New York, two of the other Republican members who had voted to impeach Trump, were in attendance.The event consisted of a succession of minute-long condemnations of the new president and his failure to stem the flow of the hundred thousand migrants who had shown up at the U.S.’s Southern border in the month of February alone. Cheney’s turn at the microphone came after McCarthy and Scalise. Even though she said little, her brisk and determinedly unflamboyant delivery harked back to her performances a decade ago, during Obama’s presidency, as an imperturbable Sunday-show critic of a Democratic administration. Even more notable was the fact that everyone at the Triangle sounded like one another, reciting the same talking points, suggesting that she and her colleague-antagonists were at last on the same page.Or so it appeared until about 24 hours later, when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene decided that it was time to weigh in. The Georgia freshman and Trump acolyte now had considerable time on her hands after a House majority — including 11 Republicans, though not Cheney — voted to strip her of her committee assignments on account of her conspiratorial and violence-espousing social media presence before taking office. Now she was introducing her Protect America First Act, which would enforce a four-year moratorium on all immigration and complete Trump’s unfinished border wall, which would be named in his honor.The bill was destined to go nowhere, but in its transparent effort to flatter Trump and further the policies most symbolically associated with him, it was a reminder of how closely he hovered over the party, regardless of Cheney’s attempts to sideline him. Greene’s defiance of Cheney’s attempt at party unity also served as a reminder of the numerous Republican lawmakers who had not been there with Cheney at the Triangle. The absent included not just reliable detractors like Gaetz — who, it would soon be reported, had come under federal investigation for sex-trafficking allegations, which he has denied — and Greene but also colleagues like Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who had both publicly defended Cheney not long before. Cheney was now a polarizing brand of her own. To stand beside her was tantamount to standing with her, which in turn meant standing against the dominant force in Republican politics.A conservative lobbyist told me of calls she received from others in her profession who supported Cheney but feared the consequences of attaching their name to a fund-raising event for her. A number of her prominent past supporters in Wyoming did not seem eager to invite renewed local wrath by discussing Cheney with me.In Cheyenne, I went to see Matt Micheli, a 45-year-old lawyer who served as Wyoming’s Republican Party chairman in 2016. “I think she views what’s happening now as a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” he told me of Cheney. “It really is a battle between the traditional Reagan-style conservative and the performative politics of the Matt Gaetz wing of the party. And if she succeeds, she’s positioned to be the leader of that post-Trump party.”The hesitant tone in Micheli’s voice suggested that a “but” was coming. “We’ve redefined what it means to be conservative,” he continued ruefully. “I could go through issue by issue, and I guarantee you I’d be more conservative than you on every single one of them. But that doesn’t matter anymore, right? It’s all about being angry and obnoxious and demonstrating how loyal you are to Donald Trump.”Micheli chose not to run for re-election for the party chairmanship in 2017, in part because he did not wish to pretend to be a Trump cheerleader. “What would happen if you ran for state party chair today?” I asked.He answered immediately. “If I wouldn’t endorse the conspiracy theories that have overtaken so much of my party, which I won’t,” he said, “I’d get crushed.”Robert Draper is a writer at large for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently, “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine. Clay Rodery is a freelance illustrator and figurative artist in Brooklyn. He currently teaches illustration at Montclair State University in New Jersey. More

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    Justice Dept. Inquiry Into Matt Gaetz Said to Be Focused on Cash Paid to Women

    The congressman and a former official in Florida sent money to the women using cash apps, receipts showed.WASHINGTON — A Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments, according to people close to the investigation and text messages and payment receipts reviewed by The New York Times.Investigators believe Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector in Seminole County, Fla., who was indicted last year on a federal sex trafficking charge and other crimes, initially met the women through websites that connect people who go on dates in exchange for gifts, fine dining, travel and allowances, according to three people with knowledge of the encounters. Mr. Greenberg introduced the women to Mr. Gaetz, who also had sex with them, the people said.One of the women who had sex with both men also agreed to have sex with an unidentified associate of theirs in Florida Republican politics, according to a person familiar with the arrangement. Mr. Greenberg had initially contacted her online and introduced her to Mr. Gaetz, the person said.Mr. Gaetz denied ever paying a woman for sex.The Justice Department inquiry is also examining whether Mr. Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl and whether she received anything of material value, according to four people familiar with the investigation. The sex trafficking count against Mr. Greenberg involved the same girl, according to two people briefed on the investigation.The authorities have also investigated whether other men connected to Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg had sex with the 17-year-old, two of the people said.Mr. Gaetz, 38, was elected to Congress in 2016 and became one of President Donald J. Trump’s most outspoken advocates.The Times has reviewed receipts from Cash App, a mobile payments app, and Apple Pay that show payments from Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg to one of the women, and a payment from Mr. Greenberg to a second woman. The women told their friends that the payments were for sex with the two men, according to two people familiar with the conversations.In encounters during 2019 and 2020, Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg instructed the women to meet at certain times and places, often at hotels around Florida, and would tell them the amount of money they were willing to pay, according to the messages and interviews.One person said that the men also paid in cash, sometimes withdrawn from a hotel ATM.Some of the men and women took ecstasy, an illegal mood-alerting drug, before having sex, including Mr. Gaetz, two people familiar with the encounters said.In some cases, Mr. Gaetz asked women to help find others who might be interested in having sex with him and his friends, according to two people familiar with those conversations. Should anyone inquire about their relationships, one person said, Mr. Gaetz told the women to say that he had paid for hotel rooms and dinners as part of their dates.The F.B.I. has questioned multiple women involved in the encounters, including as recently as January, to establish details of their relationships with Mr. Gaetz and his friends, according to text messages and two people familiar with the interviews.No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear. Mr. Gaetz’s office issued a statement on Thursday night in a response to a request for comment.“Matt Gaetz has never paid for sex,” the statement said. “Matt Gaetz refutes all the disgusting allegations completely. Matt Gaetz has never ever been on any such websites whatsoever. Matt Gaetz cherishes the relationships in his past and looks forward to marrying the love of his life.”A lawyer for Mr. Greenberg, Fritz Scheller, declined to comment, as did a Justice Department spokesman.It is not illegal to provide adults with free hotel stays, meals and other gifts, but if prosecutors think they can prove that the payments to the women were for sex, they could accuse Mr. Gaetz of trafficking the women under “force, fraud or coercion.” For example, prosecutors have filed trafficking charges against people suspected of providing drugs in exchange for sex because feeding another person’s drug habit could be seen as a form of coercion.It is also a violation of federal child sex trafficking law to provide someone under 18 with anything of value in exchange for sex, which can include meals, hotels, drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. A conviction carries a 10-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.The investigation stems from the Justice Department’s continuing inquiry into Mr. Greenberg, who potentially faces decades in prison on three dozen charges. The U.S. attorney’s office in Central Florida initially secured an indictment against Mr. Greenberg in June, alleging that he had stalked a political rival and had used his elected office to create fake identification cards.During the investigation, the authorities discovered evidence that prompted them to broaden it, and Mr. Greenberg was indicted in August on the sex trafficking charge.One of the sites the men met women through was called Seeking Arrangement, which describes itself as a place where wealthy people find attractive companions and pamper them “with fine dinners, exotic trips and allowances.” The site’s founder has said it has 20 million members worldwide. The F.B.I. mentioned the website in a conversation with at least one potential witness, according to a person familiar with the conversation.Mr. Greenberg was indicted this week on additional charges, accusing him of submitting false claims to receive pandemic relief aid from the government and trying to bribe a government official. The authorities said Mr. Greenberg undertook those efforts after he was initially indicted last summer.Mr. Greenberg, who has pleaded not guilty to the earlier charges, is scheduled to go on trial in June. He was sent to jail in March for violating the terms of his bail.Mr. Gaetz said this week that his lawyers had been in touch with the Justice Department and that he was the subject, not the target, of an investigation. Subjects of investigations are often witnesses or people who might have information that could help the government pursue its targets. But it is common for that designation to shift over the course of an investigation.“I only know that it has to do with women,” Mr. Gaetz said. “I have a suspicion that someone is trying to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward.”Mr. Gaetz, a lawyer, was first elected to the House representing the Florida Panhandle at age 34. The son of a former president of the Florida State Senate, Mr. Gaetz attended Florida State University and William & Mary Law School before serving in the Florida State Legislature.Mr. Gaetz has sought to divert attention from the Justice Department investigation by claiming that he and his father were the targets of an extortion plot by two men trying to secure funding for a separate venture.The men — Robert Kent, a former Air Force intelligence officer who runs a consulting business, and Stephen Alford, a real estate developer who has been convicted of fraud — approached Mr. Gaetz’s father, Don Gaetz, about funding their efforts to locate Robert A. Levinson, an American hostage held in Iran. They suggested to Don Gaetz that Mr. Levinson’s successful return could somehow be used to secure a pardon for Matt Gaetz if he were charged with federal crimes, according to a copy of their proposal provided to The Times.Soon after, Don Gaetz hired a lawyer and contacted the F.B.I. Matt Gaetz said his father wore a wire and taped a meeting and a telephone conversation with Mr. Alford. An email exchange between Don Gaetz’s lawyer and the Justice Department provided to The Times appears to confirm he was generally cooperating with the F.B.I. as it looked into his claims.Mr. Kent denied the Gaetzes’ assertions. He said he had heard rumors that Matt Gaetz might be under investigation and mentioned them only to sweeten his proposal. “I told him I’m not trying to extort, but if this were true, he might be interested in doing something good,” Mr. Kent said in an interview.Last year, the Trump administration notified the family of Mr. Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent, that he had died while in captivity in Iran, where he disappeared in 2007 while on an unauthorized mission for the C.I.A.But some people involved with the Levinson case continued to believe that he might still be alive, including Mr. Kent.He was stunned when he heard that Matt Gaetz had sought to tie the Justice Department investigation to an extortion plot related to the Levinson case.“He threw Levinson and the entire Levinson family under the bus,” Mr. Kent said. “I can’t imagine what these poor people have been through. This guy, to divert attention from himself, has raked up the attention to the family.”Don Gaetz also taped a phone call and a meeting with David McGee, a Levinson family lawyer, where they discussed the rescue proposal. In an interview, Mr. McGee denied any involvement and suggested Matt Gaetz was conflating the matter inappropriately with his own potential criminal liability.“He’s trying to distract attention from a pending tidal wave that is about to sink his ship,” Mr. McGee said.Adam Goldman More

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    After Capitol Riot, Republican Ties to Extremist Groups Are Under Scrutiny

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRepublican Ties to Extremist Groups Are Under ScrutinyA number of members of Congress have links to organizations and movements that played a role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.Members of a Three Percenters group provided security for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, right, during a campaign event last year in Ringgold, Ga.Credit…C.B. Schmelter/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated PressLuke Broadwater and Jan. 29, 2021Updated 10:09 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — The video’s title was posed as a question, but it left little doubt about where the men who filmed it stood. They called it “The Coming Civil War?” and in its opening seconds, Jim Arroyo, who leads an Arizona chapter of Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia, declared that the conflict had already begun.To back up his claim, Mr. Arroyo cited Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of the most far-right members of Congress. Mr. Gosar had paid a visit to the local Oath Keepers chapter a few years earlier, Mr. Arroyo recounted, and when asked if the United States was headed for a civil war, the congressman’s “response to the group was just flat out: ‘We’re in it. We just haven’t started shooting at each other yet.’”Less than two months after the video was posted, members of the Oath Keepers were among those with links to extremist groups from around the country who took part in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, prompting new scrutiny of the links between members of Congress and an array of organizations and movements that espouse far-right beliefs.Nearly 150 House Republicans supported President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him. But Mr. Gosar and a handful of other Republican members of the House had deeper ties to extremist groups who pushed violent ideas and conspiracy theories and whose members were prominent among those who stormed the halls of Congress in an effort to stop certification of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.Their ranks include Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, who like Mr. Gosar was linked to the “Stop the Steal” campaign backing Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election’s outcome.Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado has close connections to militia groups including the so-called Three Percenters, an extremist offshoot of the gun rights movement that had at least one member who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents were among the most visible of those who stormed the building, and she appeared at a rally with militia groups. Before being elected to Congress last year, Ms. Greene used social media in 2019 to endorse executing top Democrats and has suggested that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was a staged “false flag” attack. The liberal group Media Matters for America reported on Thursday that Ms. Greene also speculated on Facebook in 2018 that California wildfires might have been started by lasers from space, promoting a theory pushed by followers of QAnon.Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida appeared last year at an event also attended by members of the Proud Boys, another extremist organization whose role in the Jan. 6 assault, like those of the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, is being investigated by the F.B.I.It is not clear whether any elected officials played a role in directly facilitating the attack on the Capitol, other than helping to incite violence through false statements about the election being stolen from Mr. Trump. Officials have said they are investigating reports from Democrats that a number of House Republicans provided tours of the Capitol and other information to people who might have gone on to be part of the mob on Jan. 6. So far, no evidence has surfaced publicly to back up those claims.Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, speaking to protesters in November outside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix.Credit…Jim Urquhart/ReutersMs. Boebert said in a statement that she had “never given a tour of the U.S. Capitol to anyone besides family members in town for my swearing-in,” and she called accusations from Democrats that she gave a “reconnaissance tour” to insurgents an “irresponsible lie.” After the riot at the Capitol, she said she did not support “unlawful acts of violence.”Mr. Biggs has denied associating with Stop the Steal organizers and condemned violence “of any kind.”“Were you aware of any planned demonstration or riot at the U.S. Capitol to take place after the rally on Jan. 6, 2021? No,” Mr. Biggs said in a statement.A spokesman for Ms. Greene said she now rejects QAnon, and he tried to distance her from militia members.“She doesn’t have anything to do with it,” her communications director, Nick Dyer, said of QAnon. “She thinks it’s disinformation.” As for the militia members, he said, “Those people were at one event independently of Congresswoman Greene.”Mr. Gosar did not respond to requests for comment.Mr. Gaetz, on his podcast, said the Proud Boys were at the event he attended to provide security, and that “just because you take a picture with someone,” it does not mean “you’re tied to every viewpoint they’ve ever had or that they will ever have in the future.”But in signaling either overt or tacit support, a small but vocal band of Republicans now serving in the House provided legitimacy and publicity to extremist groups and movements as they built toward their role in supporting Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election and the attack on Congress.Aitan D. Goelman, a former federal prosecutor who helped convict the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, said that when elected officials — or even candidates for office — took actions like appearing with militia groups or other right-wing groups it “provides them with an added imprimatur of legitimacy.”An examination of many of the most prominent elected Republicans with links to right-wing groups also shows how various strands of extremism came together at the Capitol on Jan. 6.In July, Mr. Gosar, a dentist, posed for a picture with a member of the Proud Boys. Two years earlier, he spoke at a rally for a jailed leader of Britain’s anti-immigrant fringe in London, where he vilified Muslim immigrants as a “scourge.” And in 2014, he traveled to Nevada to support the armed standoff between law enforcement and supporters of the cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, who had refused to stop trespassing on federal lands.Mr. Biggs, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, was seen by leaders of the Stop the Steal movement as an inspiration and has spoken at events hosted by extremists, including one at which a founder of the Oath Keepers called for hanging Senator John McCain.Ms. Boebert, elected to the House in November, said on Twitter that “Today is 1776” on the morning of Jan. 6, and she has connections to the Three Percenters, which shares her view that gun rights are under assault. At least one member of the group has been arrested in the breach of the Capitol.Ms. Greene has for years trafficked in conspiracy theories, expressed support for QAnon and made offensive remarks about Black people, Jews and Muslims. She also appeared at a campaign event alongside members of the Three Percenters.To some degree, the members of Congress have been reflecting signals sent by Mr. Trump.During a presidential debate in October, he made a nod toward the Proud Boys, telling them to “stand back and stand by.” Two months earlier, Mr. Trump described followers of QAnon — several of whom have been charged with murder, domestic terrorism, planned kidnapping and, most recently, storming the Capitol — as “people that love our country,” adding that “they do supposedly like me.”A Stop the Steal protest in November near the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix.Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesStop the StealFew Republicans have been more linked to extremist groups than Mr. Gosar.“He’s been involved with anti-Muslim groups and hate groups,” said Mr. Gosar’s brother Dave Gosar, a lawyer in Wyoming. “He’s made anti-Semitic diatribes. He’s twisted up so tight with the Oath Keepers it’s not even funny.”Dave Gosar and other Gosar siblings ran ads denouncing their brother as a dangerous extremist when he ran for Congress in 2018. Now they are calling on Congress to expel him.“We warned everybody how dangerous he was,” Dave Gosar said.In the days after the 2020 election, Mr. Gosar and Mr. Biggs helped turn Arizona into a crucible for the Stop the Steal movement, finding common cause with hard-liners who until then had toiled in obscurity, like Ali Alexander. The two congressmen recorded a video, “This Election Is A Joke,” which was viewed more than a million times and spread disinformation about widespread voter fraud.Mr. Alexander has said he “schemed up” the Jan. 6 rally with Mr. Gosar, Mr. Biggs and another vocal proponent of Stop the Steal, Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama. Mr. Alexander’s characterization of the role of the members of Congress is exaggerated, Mr. Biggs said, but the lawmakers were part of a larger network of people who helped plan and promote the rally as part of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the will of the voters.After the election, Mr. Alexander emerged as a vocal proponent of the president’s stolen election claims, setting up a Stop the Steal website on Nov. 4 and making incendiary statements. On Dec. 8, he tweeted that he was willing to give up his life to keep Mr. Trump in office.The Arizona Republican Party followed up, retweeting Mr. Alexander’s post and adding: “He is. Are you?” Mr. Alexander has since been barred from Twitter.Ten days later, Mr. Gosar was one of the headliners at a rally in Phoenix that Mr. Alexander helped organize. Mr. Gosar used the rally to deliver a call to action, telling the crowd that they planned to “conquer the Hill” to return Mr. Trump to the presidency.During his time onstage, Mr. Alexander called Mr. Gosar “my captain” and added, “One of the other heroes has been Congressman Andy Biggs.”Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, was cited as an inspiration by one of the organizers of the Stop the Steal campaign.Credit…Al Drago for The New York TimesAlthough Mr. Biggs has played down his involvement with the Stop the Steal campaign, on Dec. 19, Mr. Alexander played a video message from Mr. Biggs to an angry crowd at an event where attendees shouted violent slogans against lawmakers. At the event, Mr. Biggs’s wife, Cindy Biggs, was seen hugging Mr. Alexander twice and speaking in his ear.In 2019, Mr. Biggs spoke at an event supported by the Patriot Movement AZ, AZ Patriots and the American Guard — all identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to The Arizona Republic. In 2015, he sat silent at an event as a founder of the Oath Keepers called for the hanging ​of Senator McCain, calling him a traitor to the Constitution. Mr. Biggs told The Republic at the time that he did not feel it was his place to speak up and denounce the comments..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.Mr. Arroyo, of the Oath Keepers in Arizona, said Mr. Gosar had attended two of their meetings, about a year apart. Mr. Arroyo said that his organization “does not advocate for breaking the law” and that he was “saddened to see the display of trespassing on the Capitol building by a few out-of-control individuals.”Just like Mr. Gosar’s family, Mr. Biggs’s two brothers have publicly denounced him, saying he was at least partly responsible for the violence on Jan. 6. In addition, a Democratic state representative in Arizona, Athena Salman, has called on the Justice Department to investigate the actions of Mr. Gosar and Mr. Biggs before the riot, saying they “encouraged, facilitated, participated and possibly helped plan this anti-democratic insurrection.”Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado tweeted, “Today is 1776,” on the morning of the Capitol riot.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times‘I Am the Militia’In December 2019, hundreds of protesters descended on the Colorado Statehouse to oppose a new state law meant to take firearms out of the hands of emotionally disturbed people.Among those at the rally were members of the Three Percenters, which federal prosecutors describe as a “radical militia group,” and a congressional hopeful with a history of arrests named Lauren Boebert, who was courting their votes. Armed with her own handgun, she posed for photographs with militia members and defiantly pledged to oppose the law.In the months that followed, militia groups would emerge as one of Ms. Boebert’s crucial political allies. As her campaign got underway last year, she wrote on Twitter, “I am the militia.”Militia members provided security for her campaign events and frequented the restaurant she owns, Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colo. In a recently posted video, a member of the Three Percenters was filmed giving Ms. Boebert a Glock 22 handgun.Another member of the group, Robert Gieswein, who posed for a photograph in front of Ms. Boebert’s restaurant last year, is facing federal charges in the storming of the Capitol and attacking the police.Photographs from the attack show him clad in tactical gear, goggles and a helmet, wrestling with Capitol Police officers to remove metal barricades and brandishing a baseball bat. Prosecutors have also cited a video of Mr. Gieswein encouraging other rioters as they smashed a window at the Capitol.Once inside, Mr. Gieswein was photographed with another suspect, Dominic Pezzola, a former Marine and a member of the Proud Boys, who has also been charged in the Capitol attack.Ms. Boebert’s communications director, Benjamin Stout, said in an email that she “has always condemned all forms of political violence and has repeatedly made clear that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”He added, “Simply because she takes a photo with someone that asks for one doesn’t mean she endorses every single belief they have or agrees with all other public statements or causes they support.”Robert Gieswein, in a helmet and tactical gear during the riot at the Capitol, is a member of the Three Percenters extremist group, which has supported Ms. Boebert.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe QAnon CaucusOne of the animating forces behind the attack on the Capitol was the movement known as QAnon, and QAnon has few more high-profile supporters than Ms. Greene.QAnon is a movement centered on the fantastical claim that Mr. Trump, secretly aided by the military, was elected to smash a cabal of Democrats, international financiers and “Deep State” bureaucrats who worship Satan and abuse children. It prophesied an apocalyptic showdown, known as “the Storm,” between Mr. Trump and his enemies. During the Storm, their enemies, including Mr. Biden and many Democratic and Republican members of Congress, would be arrested and executed.The mob that attacked the Capitol included many visible QAnon supporters wearing “Q” shirts and waving “Q” banners.Among them was Jake Angeli, a QAnon devotee who styled himself the “Q Shaman.” Mr. Angeli, whose real name is Jacob Chansley, stormed the Capitol in horns and animal furs, and left a note threatening Vice President Mike Pence.Also among them was Ashli Babbitt, a QAnon believer who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to climb through a window in a barricaded door near the House chamber.Ms. Greene was an early adherent, calling QAnon “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out.” Many of her Facebook posts in recent years reflected language used by the movement, talking about hanging prominent Democrats or executing F.B.I. agents.Ms. Greene has also displayed a fondness for some of the militia groups whose members were caught on video attacking the Capitol, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. Speaking in 2018 at the Mother of All Rallies, a pro-Trump gathering in Washington, she praised militias as groups that can protect people against “a tyrannical government.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More