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      ‘Morally indefensible’ – but George W Bush will not come out against Trump

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      The MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell this week hit out at George W Bush, the Republican former president, for refusing to weigh in on America’s looming presidential election.“All any decent person wants him to do is to say, ‘Don’t vote for Donald Trump, and here’s why,’ and he won’t even do that,” O’Donnell told the Fast Politics podcast, of the Republican president who was in office from 2001 to 2009.Increasingly, Bush – and some other top Republicans from his political era – are looking lonely in their ongoing refusal to take a side in an election in which many have warned that US democracy is under threat from Trump’s open sympathies with autocracy.Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, whose January 6 committee role cost her a US House seat in Wyoming, have endorsed Kamala Harris. So have other senior Republicans, including more than 100 who this week signed a letter declaring that Trump, their party’s nominee for a third election running, must never return to the White House.“We believe that the president of the United States must be a principled, serious and steady leader,” the officials said. “We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as president and Donald Trump does not.”Big-name signatories included Chuck Hagel, a former senator and defense secretary; Gen Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA chief; and John Negroponte, once ambassador to the UN. Robert Zoellick, a longtime aide to both presidents Bush and a deputy to James Baker, secretary of state to the elder Bush, was on the list too.Missing from the list, however, were Baker, the younger Bush and his own secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. As perhaps the three most senior Republicans who have not come out against Trump in this election cycle, Bush, Rice and Baker’s lack of comment excites growing comment itself.Bush’s office recently said he would not endorse, having “retired from presidential politics years ago”, perhaps ensuring that his most lasting comment on his successor will be the one he reportedly delivered on the dais at the Capitol after Trump’s inaugural speech in 2017, “American carnage” and all: “That was some weird shit.”Rice did oppose Trump in 2016. Amid the Access Hollywood scandal, over Trump’s boasts about sexual assault, Rice said he should withdraw as the Republican candidate, in favor of “someone who has the dignity and stature to run for the highest office in the greatest democracy on earth”.She has commented on Trump’s presidency too. In 2021, she said his appeal to people who felt let down by establishment politicians was “something that we probably still really need to pay attention to”. Earlier this year, Rice spoke out against isolationism, another central tenet of Trumpism. But that drew a rebuke from Adam Kinzinger, the former congressman from Illinois who sat with Cheney on the January 6 committee and who endorsed Harris at the Democratic national convention.“It’s time to speak up and do more,” Kinzinger said. “You’re not fighting against ‘isolationism’. You’re fighting against Trump and you need to say this out loud. No more straddling the fence, Republicans. You’re for Trump or against him. Pick a side.”Baker has not taken a public position on Trump but in 2020, his biographers reported that though the “myriad ethical scandals surrounding Trump were head-spinning, Baker kept telling himself it was worth it to get conservative judges, tax cuts and deregulation”.“I will vote for the Republican,” Baker was quoted as saying. “I really will.”Now 94 but still active in the public realm, Baker has not publicly indicated how he will vote this year. A source close to him said he had been sharply critical of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in 2020. Nonetheless, the former secretary of state’s words in his biography ring loud.“I won’t leave my party. You can say my party has left me because the leader of it has. But I think it’s important, the big picture.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn most eyes, though, the big picture has only grown more alarming. Trump has incited a deadly attack on Congress; beaten a second impeachment arising from that attack; been convicted on 34 criminal charges with more than 50 pending; been ordered to pay hundreds of millions in civil cases regarding business fraud and a defamation suit arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”; and launched an election campaign of breathtaking racist invective and lies.“Taxes go up, taxes go down. Regulations are imposed, they are withdrawn. But a democracy? You can’t squander that. Our reputation in the world, the Nato alliance at a time of extreme danger – once those things are gone, they would be exceptionally hard to rebuild.”That was the view of one Washington Republican, a White House official under both Bushes whose job now precludes public endorsements but who was granted anonymity to speak frankly and said they would vote for Harris.With a laugh, the former official suggested George W Bush “may write in Condi Rice again”, a reference to the protest vote Bush said he lodged in 2020, rather than support Joe Biden.As for Baker, the former official said: “Don’t forget, he’s from Houston. I think if you spend 50 years around Houston, you just absorb the oil and gas view of the world. Many people in the oil and gas industry are very anti-Biden, very anti-Harris, largely because of the perception that Biden was for the Green New Deal, which is false, and then the natural gas export review.”For Republicans, the former official said, it is easier to come out against Trump in the national security space and what might be called the democracy space, given the enormity of Trump’s election subversion and January 6 and anxious questions about his relationships with autocrats including Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-un of North Korea.“There are the Dick Cheneys of the world, who basically say: ‘This is about democracy. This is about January 6. Donald Trump cannot be trusted with power.’ I would also suspect that in Cheney’s case, this goes back to his tenure in the defense department [under George HW Bush], and if you recall the op-ed that all the living secretaries of defense wrote on 3 January 2021, it’s all coming out of that.”That column, for the Washington Post, urged all Americans to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Three days later, Trump ensured that did not happen.The former official continued: “While there have been a number of more moderate Republicans who have endorsed Harris, I do not see this as ideological. I see it as, principally, first stop Trump, then attempt to rebuild the party.”Such ambitions may also motivate establishment Republicans who have chosen to back Trump, among them the New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu, and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who fought Trump in the primary. All may have eyes on a post-Trump world – either in 2024 if he loses or 2028 if he wins.If so, the former White House official suggested, it may not prove a wise course.“I think it would be hugely, hugely difficult to rebuild the party, largely because the Trumpers just have control of pretty much everything in the states, in the state parties.“But I think that is the task of a generation, and even more moderate figures are going to have to make nods in the direction of Trumpism for the foreseeable future.” More

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      Liz Cheney calls Trump a ‘catastrophe’ and urges Republicans to vote for Harris

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      The former congresswoman Liz Cheney called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in November’s election.“We see it on a daily basis – somebody who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he’s not re-elected,” Cheney said in an interview on ABC News This Week, a show on the network that is hosting Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Harris.Cheney also reaffirmed her endorsement of Harris and urged other prominent Republicans who have stated they plan on writing in a third option rather than vote for Trump to cast their ballots for the Democrat instead.“At the end of the day, you just have to wrestle with your own conscience when you’re there in the voting booth. And I would expect that you will see far more Republicans and independents, you know, when the time comes, and they’ve got to make that decision, make the right decision,” said Cheney. “Given the closeness of this election, particularly if you’re going to find yourself voting in a swing state, you’ve got to take the extra step if you really do recognize the threat that Donald Trump poses. Then it’s not enough to simply say, ‘I’m not going to vote for him.’”Asked whether she is still a Republican, Cheney claimed she is still a conservative. She said she hopes to “rebuild” the Republican party after the 5 November presidential election.A number of other Republicans have stopped short of endorsing Trump, who has been convicted of criminally falsifying business records while also facing other charges in connection with his attempts to reverse his defeat to Joe Biden while running for re-election in the 2020 presidential race.They include George W Bush, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence, US senator Mitt Romney and Maryland governor Larry Hogan.On Sunday, Nikki Haley – who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and later challenged him unsuccessfully in the Republican presidential primary – refused to answer when asked on a CBS Face the Nation interview if Trump was a good candidate.But unlike Cheney, they have not lent their support to Harris.Cheney fell out of favor with many in the Republican party after criticizing Trump and serving on the congressional committee which investigated the attack that his supporters aimed at the US Capitol in early January 2021. She lost re-election in Wyoming in 2022 to a Republican primary challenger backed by Trump.On Friday, her father and Bush vice-president Dick Cheney announced he plans on voting for Kamala Harris in November, rebuking his own party. A statement from Dick Cheney cited Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.Harris told reporters covering a campaign stop in Wisconsin on Saturday that she was “honored” to have the Cheneys’ endorsement and credited them for putting “country above party”. More

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      Former vice-president Dick Cheney confirms he will vote for Kamala Harris

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      The former vice-president Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, in November’s presidential election, he said in a statement on Friday.“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said of the former president and Republican nominee. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Thursday, first announced her father’s endorsement when asked by Mark Leibovich of the Atlantic during an onstage interview at the Texas Tribune festival in Austin.“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Liz Cheney said to audience cheers.“Wow,” Leibovich replied.Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 2022.In a campaign ad for Liz Cheney as she sought a fourth term as Wyoming’s lone congressperson, Dick Cheney called the former president a “coward” for trying to “steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him”.The ad did little good for his daughter in a deep-red state that once held the Cheney family dear but is now thoroughly in Trump’s corner. By a two-to-one margin, Liz Cheney lost her Republican primary to the Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman.Notably absent from Friday’s endorsement announcement was the 83-year-old former vice-president, who has made few if any public appearances over the past year or more.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Liz Cheney urges US supreme court to rule quickly on Trump’s immunity claim

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      The former congresswoman and co-chair of the House January 6 committee Liz Cheney is urging the US supreme court to rule quickly on Donald Trump’s claim that he has immunity from prosecution for acts he committed while president – so that his 2020 election interference trial can begin before the 2024 election this November.“If delay prevents this Trump case from being tried this year, the public may never hear critical and historic evidence developed before the grand jury, and our system may never hold the man most responsible for January 6 to account,” Cheney wrote in an opinion article for the New York Times, published on Monday.Trump faces four federal election subversion charges, arising from his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, fueled by his lie about electoral fraud and culminating in the deadly attack on Congress by extremist supporters, urged on by the then president, on 6 January 2021.Cheney warned: “I know how Mr Trump’s delay tactics work,” adding: “Mr Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether.”The special counsel Jack Smith, prosecuting the case against Trump, has urged the court to reject Trump’s immunity claim as “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.Cheney, a Republican and the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, was ousted from her congressional seat, representing Wyoming, after she became one of the strongest voices from the GOP demanding Trump be held accountable for inciting and failing to stop the January 6 insurrection.She has since said she would prefer Democrats to win in the 2024 elections over members of her own party as it has become more extreme, because she feared the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship” and that another Trump White House presented a tangible “threat” to American democracy.Cheney said in her New York Times article: “The special counsel’s indictment lays out Mr Trump’s detailed plan to overturn the 2020 election … [and that] senior advisers in the White House, Justice Department and elsewhere repeatedly warned that Mr Trump’s claims of election fraud were false and that his plans for January 6 were illegal.”She added: “If Mr Trump’s tactics prevent his January 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people – evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on January 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.”The court’s nine-member bench leans very conservative, especially after Trump nominated three rightwing justices while he was president. The court hears oral arguments in the immunity case on Thursday.Trump and his team urged the court to find that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts they take in office and therefore dismiss the federal criminal case. More

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      Liz Cheney says ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel ‘enabled’ Trump’s ‘criminality’

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” with her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s new career in media.“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel – a member of the powerful Republican Romney family who reportedly dropped the name at Trump’s behest – became RNC chair in 2017.In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.Cheney lost her seat in Congress later that year. Kinzinger chose to retire.McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.McDaniel’s move to NBC was announced last week. On Sunday, she appeared on Meet the Press, the flagship politics show.Characterising her support for Trump’s election fraud lies as “taking one for the whole team”, she said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse” and that Biden won “fair and square” – but still claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [with battleground state elections] in 2020”.A former Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, issued an on-air protest.“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this,” he told the current host, Kristin Welker, “because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination”.Monday brought more reports of staff discontent – and its open expression by two of the network’s biggest names.On Morning Joe, the MSNBC show that often sets the Washington agenda, co-host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said: “We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire” McDaniel.“We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday. We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Miss McDaniel’s role in Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.”Scarborough’s wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, said: “To be clear, we believe NBC news should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage.“But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier. And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor. Here’s why.”There followed a compilation of McDaniel’s comments about the 2020 election, which Brzezinski called “exhausting”.Disquiet was also reported over McDaniel reportedly being paid $300,000.“Across MSNBC they have been cutting contributors,” an unnamed host told Politico. “So everyone’s like, what the fuck? You found 300 for her?” More

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      Trump calls for Liz Cheney to be jailed for investigating him over Capitol attack

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      Donald Trump has renewed calls for Liz Cheney – his most prominent Republican critic – to be jailed for her role in investigating his actions during the January 6 Capitol attack launched by his supporters in 2021, a move that is bound to raise further fears that the former president could persecute his political opponents if given another White House term.In posts on Sunday on his Truth Social platform, Trump said other members of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack – and concluded he had plotted to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden – should be imprisoned.Those statements followed Trump’s previous comments that he would act like a “dictator” on the first day of a second presidency if given one by voters.Cheney, who served as vice-chair of the January 6 committee and was one of two Republicans on the panel, lost her seat in the House of Representatives to a Trump-backed challenger, Harriet Hageman, in 2022. She responded later on Sunday, saying her fellow Republican Trump was “afraid of the truth”.Trump has been charged with four felonies in relation to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. The US supreme court is considering Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity from prosecution in the case because he served as president from 2017 to 2021.Trump is also facing charges of 2020 election interference in Georgia, retention of government secrets after he left the Oval Office and hush-money payments that were illicitly covered up.On Sunday, Trump wrote that Cheney should “go to jail along with the rest” of the select January 6 House committee, which he sought to insult in his post on Truth Social by calling it the “unselect committee”.Trump founded Truth after he was temporarily banned from Twitter – now known as X – in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.In a separate Truth Social post, Trump linked to an article written by Kash Patel, a White House staffer in Trump’s administration. In the article, published on the rightwing website the Federalist, Patel claimed that Cheney and the committee “suppressed evidence” which “completely exonerates Trump” from charges that he had a hand in the January 6 insurrection.Patel, who was chief of staff in the defense department under Trump, said in December that if the former president was re-elected, his administration would “come after the people in the media” who had reported on Trump’s attempts to remain in power.Trump wrote: “She [Cheney] should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country! She illegally destroyed the evidence. Unreal!!!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe suggestions that Cheney and others should be targeted for their role in the January 6 investigation came after House Republicans released a report that they claim contradicts the testimony that Trump tried to grab the wheel of his presidential limousine on January 6 in his excitement to join his supporters attacking the Capitol.Cheney was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the attack, which has been linked to nine deaths and sought to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.After a series of retirements and Trump-backed primary challenges, only two of those Republicans remain in office.Cheney’s father, former US vice-president Dick Cheney, released a video in 2022 urging Republicans to reject Trump.“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big,” Dick Cheney, who served as George W Bush’s vice-president, said in the video. More

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      Liz Cheney: supreme court delay will deny voters ‘crucial evidence’ on Trump

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      A Republican member of the January 6 committee has said the supreme court’s decision to wade into Donald Trump’s immunity case will deny Americans crucial information about the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.Liz Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman who was ousted by primary voters angry at her participation in the hearings that followed the insurrection, also demanded the justices come to a speedy decision.In a message posted to X, formerly Twitter, Cheney, a vocal Trump critic, said voters needed to have a verdict on the presumed Republican presidential nominee before they go to the polls in November.“Delaying the January 6 trial suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear,” she wrote.“Donald Trump attempted to overturn an election and seize power. Our justice system must be able to bring him to trial before the next election. SCOTUS [supreme court of the US] should decide this case promptly.”Justices on Wednesday set the week of 22 April to hear oral arguments over Trump’s assertion that he cannot be held criminally responsible for actions he took to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.Trump, who is facing a four-count indictment including conspiracy to defraud the US and conspiracy to obstruct the congressional certification of the election results, has declared the decision a victory, mostly because it puts the trial on hold, possibly until after the election.Some Democrats, meanwhile, are also upbeat about it. The California congressman Ted Lieu, who has previously accused Trump of committing multiple election crimes, said such a delay would work to his party’s advantage at the ballot box.“My view of the SCOTUS action: if the trial is delayed until after November, we will see the largest blue wave in history,” he wrote, also on X.“If November becomes a referendum on whether Trump faces justice, then Democrats will absolutely flip the House, keep the White House and expand the Senate.”Some legal experts are warning the supreme court’s action, along with delays already affecting several of the other legal cases Trump is facing, could have consequences for democracy.While many believe the court will ultimately confirm the rejection by a Washington DC appeals court of Trump’s claim, they say the delay could prove harmful.“This case really is most important in terms of democracy, and the most compelling with the evidence. That makes it very difficult in the sense there would be no verdict on this critical issue that cuts to the heart of democracy,” said Carl Tobias, Williams professor of law at the University of Richmond and a veteran supreme court analyst.“Maybe the supreme court just couldn’t resist, as the highest court in the land, weighing in on this very weighty question of presidential immunity, though most people who are clear-eyed about this don’t believe that there’s much of an argument for immunity in this context.“The court could have been perfectly satisfied with the DC circuit opinion, which was comprehensive and clear, and just seen no reason to take it up. But this is about delay. I don’t think anybody really disputes that. Trump’s theory over his entire life in litigation is that delay is his friend, and here it really is. It’s conceivable none of these cases goes to verdict before the election.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, Trump claimed that “legal scholars are extremely thankful for the supreme court’s decision”, and insisted without irony that future presidents would fear “wrongful prosecution and retaliation” after they left office if he loses.Trump himself has spoken openly of seeking “retribution and revenge” over political foes if he is returned to office, and said he would appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family.A former lawyer and legal analyst Lisa Rubin said she was “beyond terrified for our country” because the supreme court will delay the trial and potentially affect the election.“I honestly thought there would be enough votes on the court not to take this case, for no other reason than bad facts make bad law,” she told MSNBC News. “And the facts here could not be worse. If there was a context in which you wanted to decide the bounds of presidential immunity it’s not this case.”With oral arguments set for April, a ruling might not be handed down until May at the earliest.Alternatively, in the worst-case scenario for special counsel Jack Smith, the supreme court could wait until the end of its current term in July. That could mean the start of a trial expected to take up to three months might be delayed until no earlier than late September.Trump’s legal strategy has been to stall the various cases against him, ideally until after November’s election, in the hopes that a second term of office will allow him to pardon himself or install a loyal attorney general to drop charges.
      Hugo Lowell contributed reporting More

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      Liz Cheney: potential Trump running mate Elise Stefanik is ‘a total crackpot’

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      Elise Stefanik of New York, a top House Republican and a leading contender to be Donald Trump’s presidential running mate, is “a total crackpot”, the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney said.Cheney threw the barb on Tuesday, in response to a statement in which Stefanik called the House January 6 committee on which Cheney was vice-chair “illegitimate and unconstitutional” and claimed it “illegally deleted records”.Cheney said: “This is what Elise Stefanik⁩ said, in a rare moment of honesty, about the … attack on our Capitol.”Cheney posted Stefanik’s statement from 6 January 2021, the day Trump supporters stormed Congress after he told them to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, a riot now linked to nine deaths; she added: “One day she will have to explain how and why she morphed into a total crackpot. History, and our children, deserve to know.”In her original January 6 statement, Stefanik lamented “truly a tragic day for America” and “condemn[ed] the dangerous violence and destruction that occurred today”. The perpetrators, she said, “must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.Stefanik also “prayed” that “colleagues on both sides of the aisle, their staffs, and all Americans … remain safe”, and thanked police, the national guard and Capitol staffers for “protecting the People’s House and the American people”.Trump was impeached for inciting the riot, with the support of 10 House Republicans, but acquitted at trial in the Senate when only seven Republicans voted to convict. He currently faces 91 criminal charges – 17 for election subversion – as well as civil suits and attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection. Regardless, he dominates presidential primary polling.Stefanik is chair of the House Republican conference, the fourth-ranking Republican position.Earlier this month, she declined to commit to certifying the 2024 election and told NBC she had “concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages”, referring to the more than 1,200 people arrested over the riot, of whom hundreds have been convicted.Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who sat with Cheney on the House January 6 committee, put the “hostages” remark down to Stefanik’s ambition.“Does she no longer believe violence is ‘unacceptable’ and ‘must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law’?” Raskin asked. “Does her change of heart have anything to do with wanting to be Trump’s running mate?”Cheney – Stefanik’s predecessor as conference chair – was one of two Republicans who defied party leaders to join the January 6 committee. The other, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, retired. Cheney lost her position and then her Wyoming seat to a Trump-backed rival.Notwithstanding her status as the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, membership of the Republican establishment and strongly conservative views, she has not come back to the fold.On Tuesday, Stefanik did not immediately comment on Cheney’s “crackpot” remark. More