A report Tuesday by the Republican majority on the House Committee on House Administration recommended that former Rep. Liz Cheney be investigated “for potential criminal witness tampering” on the January 6 Committee.
The report, the committee’s second such report on the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, found abuses by Cheney and the Democrat-dominated committee, and also concluded that the committee was not constituted according to the law.
As Breitbart News has previously reported, Cheney was discovered to have communicated with the Democrats’ “star” witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, without her attorney present. (Hutchinson’s sensational claims that then-President Donald Trump tried to wrestle the steering wheel of his presidential vehicle away from Secret Service agents to force them to drive to the U.S. Capitol during the riot were later refuted by the evidence).
As Breitbart News also reported, the committee produced evidence in October from subpoenaed text messages that showed Cheney communicating with Hutchinson through former White House aide Alyssah Farah Griffin (now a member of the cast on ABC’s The View).
Cheney’s role has led to a Bar complaint against her, as well as a Bar complaint against a left-wing dark money group called the 65 Project, which itself filed a Bar complaint against Hutchinson’s former attorney, Stefan Passantino. (The latter is suing MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman for defamation over his false claim that Passantino coached Hutchinson to lie.)
The report also finds that the committee was improperly constituted — a point made in several lawsuits against committee subpoenas, as Breitbart News observed in 2021:
The [enabling] resolution, H. Res. 503, provides that the committee “shall” consist of 13 members, five of which “shall be appointed after consultation with the minority leader.”
But the committee only has nine members, seven of whom are Democrats, and only two of whom are hand-picked anti-Trump Republicans. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected the five members chosen by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (D-CA), an unprecedented step to ensure a one-sided inquiry.
The report also finds that the January 6 Committee “neglected or withheld evidence from its Final Report and deleted voluminous records it should have preserved.” As Breitbart News has reported, then-incoming Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) warned the committee to preserve its records in late 2022, but the committee destroyed some of the evidence it had gathered, potentially denying exculpatory materials to hundreds of January 6 defendants.
There has been speculation that Cheney could receive a pardon from outgoing President Joe Biden to immunize her against future investigation and prosecution, lest the Trump administration prosecute her for her committee role.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
