Liz Cheney: ‘We did not have a peaceful transfer of power in 2021’

Former Rep. Liz Cheney on Sunday pushed back against the idea that there was a peaceful transfer of power in 2021, a line that has been repeated by Trump-supporters in recent interviews and at campaign events.

Former President Donald Trump “sat and watched for over three hours while our Capitol was brutally attacked by a mob that he sent there while police officers were brutally beaten. And Donald Trump refused to tell them to go home for over three hours,” Cheney (R-Wyo.) told NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker. “So anybody who is interested in the truth ought to go look at those videos. We did not have a peaceful transfer of power in 2021.”

Cheney, a life-long conservative and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has been a vocal opponent of Trump since he tried to overturn the 2020 election. She endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in September and has been campaigning for Harris in recent weeks.

The notion that the 2021 transfer of power was peaceful has been a popular Republican talking point since Ohio Sen. JD Vance said it in the vice Presidential debate.

“It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250, years in this country,” Vance told his opponent, Gov. Tim Walz and the debate moderators.

It was echoed most recently on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who made an appearance immediately prior to Cheney. When asked if he will certify the election results no matter who wins, Johnson told Welker that “we will have a peaceful transfer of power. We did in 2020.”

Cheney explicitly said that she does not believe Johnson will fulfill his constitutional obligation to certify the election if Trump does not win. She referenced an amicus Supreme Court brief that Johnson signed in 2020 alleging four states had defied the Constitution by violating their own election rules despite conversations between Johnson and Cheney where he implied that he knew Trump’s claims were false.

“He has a record, repeatedly, of doing things that he knows to be wrong, he knows to be unconstitutional, in order to placate Donald Trump,” Cheney said.

She added that leaders of the Republican Party are afraid of Trump and in the grips of “cowardice.”

“That they are willing to perpetuate his lies at the expense of their duty to the Constitution tells you something about the real damage that’s been done to the Republican Party,” she said.

Cheney herself was ousted from Republican Party leadership for serving as vice chair of the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection. She warned that if Trump is elected, he will only appoint those who enabled him to claim election fraud and try to overturn the 2020 election.

“He will appoint people like [former national security adviser] Mike Flynn,” Cheney said. “36 hours ago, Mike Flynn was at an event where he was asked whether or not the president’s opponent should be executed. And he basically said, ‘Listen, yes, I’m going to unleash the gates of hell.’ These are the kinds of people that Donald Trump will be putting in place.”