Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican who is leaving office, alleged on Monday night that a colleague of hers referred to Donald Trump as “orange Jesus” while formally contesting the ex-election president’s loss.
The ejected conservative Trump critic detailed the incident in the GOP cloak room hours before supporters of the former president stormed the US Capitol to prevent lawmakers from recognizing his defeat.
“I was composing my remarks; I was scheduled to speak that day, and the desks were covered with sheets of paper. And I questioned a staff member in the cloakroom, “What are these paper sheets?” Because members were signing them,’ Cheney explained.
The staffer said that they were objection forms for anybody who wished to register their opposition to President Joe Biden’s election. Only one objection is required, but according to Cheney, “there were so many people who wanted to register their opposition that they posted sign-up forms in the cloakroom.”
“As I sat there, a member entered and signed each state’s form,” she said. Then he murmured, “The things we do for the Orange Christ.” And I thought, you know, you’re taking an unconstitutional act,’ added Cheney.
The conservative legislator was shunned by her own party for her criticism of Trump in the wake of the US Capitol riot last year and her involvement on the January 6 committee investigating him.
In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Monday evening, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney lambasted her soon-to-be-former House GOP colleagues for their steadfast support to Trump.
August saw her primary defeat at the hands of a Trump-backed opponent.
On Monday night, Cheney blasted her soon-to-be-gone colleagues, accusing them of treating the former president ‘as if he were a king’ and portraying their enduring fealty as a threat to democracy.
The elected leaders of the Republican Party minimize the violence that occurred on January 6, and they urge that everyone else do the same. This has become a litmus test,’ she remarked, taking aim at the support of her former allies for her main opponent.
As if the hundreds of terrible injuries sustained by Capitol police officers who guarded our Capitol that day were insignificant.
She noted that Mike Pence served as president for the majority of the day.
Cheney also blasted Trump and his followers’ vitriolic assaults on federal law enforcement in the aftermath of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, during which agents apparently collected highly secret materials that were not intended to leave the secure facility.
She asserted that elected Republicans treat the former president as if he were a king.
Cheney has been one of the few Republicans to openly criticize Trump’s handling of confidential documents, which the Justice Department thinks may have violated the Espionage Act and other criminal statutes.
Cheney stated, “[T]hose who are protecting Donald Trump, elected leaders of my party, are now willing to condemn FBI agents and Department of Justice officials and pretend that taking top secret…documents and keeping them in a desk drawer, an office in Mar-a-Lago, or an unsecured location, anywhere, was not a problem.”
They are attempting to justify this conduct. She said, “They are attempting to claim that it was normal and a storage issue.”
‘And evidently, the Department of Justice has evidence that Donald Trump repeatedly lied about possessing these records. According to the behavior of elected politicians in my party, this is now also justifiable.