This is repulsive. That investigation was done by a committee all of whose members were chosen by Nancy Pelosi, and was produced like a TV show. There was no cross examination of witnesses. The media fell for it, but it was utterly one-sided. A show trial. https://t.co/9LSmr8rGCU

— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 2, 2025

He could not have said it better.

Liz Cheney, who was thrown out of Congress by her own voters for her rabid, blinding hatred of President Trump, allowed her Trump-hate to drive her to a level of criminality that ought to put her in the dock.

A mere two weeks ago, a major report from Congress held that Cheney ought to be arrested for knowingly tampering with witnesses on the Jan. 6 committee:

According to ABC News:

Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration's subcommittee on Oversight, in a new report suggests former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney should be investigated for alleged criminal witness tampering, claiming she played an "integral role" shaping key witness testimony before the Jan. 6 committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

 

...

Cheney's name appears in the report more than 120 times, excluding the table of contents, going line-by-line to blast her participation as vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee.

"Without authority and against House Rules -- the role of ranking member, Congress itself must right its former wrongs and declare this appointment of Representative Cheney invalid now," the report states.

The report alleges that as Cheney participated in the investigation, she colluded with Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide, about her testimony describing then-President Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The report contends that Cheney not only "backchannelled" with Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump White House aide and a host of ABC's "The View," to get Hutchinson to change her narrative but also communicated with her "directly for days." After that, the report alleges that Cheney also convinced Hutchinson to fire her attorney, Stefan Passantino.

"According to text messages, that appear to be from the encrypted messaging app "Signal," between Hutchinson and Farah Griffin obtained by the Subcommittee, Cheney agreed to communicate with Hutchinson through Farah Griffin," the subcommittee said.

"It is unusual -- and potentially unethical -- for a Member of Congress conducting an investigation to contact a witness if the Member knows that the individual is represented by legal counsel," the report states. "This appears to be precisely what Representative Cheney did at this time, and within a matter of days of these secret conversations, Hutchinson would go on to recant her previous testimony and introduce her most outlandish claims."

"What other information was communicated during these phone calls may never be known, but what is known is that Representative Cheney consciously attempted to minimize her contact with Hutchinson in her book, and the most likely reason to try to bury that information would be if Representative Cheney knew that it was improper and unethical to communicate with Hutchinson without her counsel present," the report states.

"It must be emphasized that Representative Cheney would likely have known her communications without the knowledge of Hutchinson's attorney were illicit and unethical at that time," the report said.

And yes, that should give her legal problems -- blackmailing, witness tampering, knowingly doing something that was illegal -- because it is illegal.

As vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee in a very staged presentation put on by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Cheney served as dupe for Democrat partisan interests, while all along making flowery flapdoodle speeches about "democracy," meaning, the highly questionable installation of Joe Biden into office as president after a fraud-filled election, which left our country a shambles.

The March 2024 House GOP report found that Cheney 'deleted records and hid evidence.'

According to Fox News:

House Republicans released a report claiming the Jan. 6 select committee "deleted" records and hired "Hollywood producers" to promote a political narrative while investigating the circumstances surrounding supporters of former President Donald Trump breaching the Capitol in 2021. 

"For nearly two years, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's January 6th Select Committee promoted hearsay and cherry-picked information to promote its political goal – to legislatively prosecute former President Donald Trump," Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., chairman of the Committee on House Administration's Subcommittee on Oversight, said in a statement accompanied by his "Initial Findings Report" on Monday. 

"It was no surprise that the Select Committee’s final report focused primarily on former President Trump and his supporters, not the security failures and reforms needed to ensure the United States Capitol is safer today than in 2021."'

...

"THE SELECT COMMITTEE DELETED RECORDS AND HID EVIDENCE - Reps. Thompson and Cheney failed to turn over video recordings of witness interviews and depositions despite using these recordings in their high-profile, primetime hearings. The Subcommittee recovered over one hundred deleted or password-protected files, including some files that were deleted days before Republicans took the majority. They also hid multiple transcribed interviews of witnesses who had firsthand knowledge of Trump‘s actions on January 6," the report found.

So she's been a sleazebag for a while, and this wasn't her first rodeo.

Earlier in her career, she got a plum State Department job she wasn't particularly qualified for on nepotism grounds, and then use that position to shield onetime World Bank President and big neocon Paul Wolfowitz's Arab girlfriend from conflict-of-interest issues under her wing at a salary higher than the Secretary of State. When she ran for Congress in 2013 to represent Wyoming, she lied about her residency there to get an in-state fishing license for a cheaper rate. 

Seems there's nothing she won't do for her own self-interest or ambition.

Now she's got Joe forking out honors for her, the awarding of which dishonors the honor entirely.

Joe's lionization of Liz is as much about legitimizing himself as the emblem of "democracy" as it is about shielding her from the legal consequences of her own illegal acts.

But it's also Joe being Joe, cheapening the value of the honors by handing it to a partisan hack who tried to legitimize him in order to Get Trump, to exercise her grudges, to stop her permawars and nationbuildings, and who campaigned for Kamala Harris as a "Republican," driving a lot of Democrat voters to actually vote for Trump.

Joe was said to be pleased that Kamala lost the election, so obviously, he'd be happy with one of the skunks who drove Democrats away from Harris as if from a bad smell. Joe wouldn't be Joe if he wasn't always thinking of Joe.

More broadly, it's Joe cheapening the presidency and the dignity of the office, which he has done in so many ways already. He permitted massive corruption because he was corrupt himself. He threw out pardons and commutations of sentence for huge numbers of the nation's most heinous killers and child rapists, cheapening the value of that presidential power and justice itself. Now he's cheapening the nation's honors, throwing them out to partisan hacks who ought to be prosecuted, as his means of shielding them from the consequences of their acts that happened to benefit him politically.

This is his latest low blow in a series of blow-it-all-up acts on his bitter way out. It's disgusting, and just one more lasting black mark on Biden's miserable legacy.

Image: Caricature by DonkeyHotey, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed