Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning

by Liz Cheney

Tom Rice, a tax attorney from South Carolina, was a member of the House Freedom Caucus, and his impeachment vote caught people by surprise.

When asked to explain his vote during a debate in 2022, Tom’s answer was clear and patriotic: “Democracy is a fragile thing, and the one thing we have to protect us from tyranny is our Constitution. Our Constitution has to be protected at all costs.”

Jaime Herrera Beutler was a leader in Congress and a young mother who often brought her kids to work with her in the Capitol.

She was relentless in her search for the truth, and issued a comprehensive statement to her constituents, outlining what she had learned about Trump’s conduct during those critical hours. Many others had heard the same things Jaime did. They lacked her courage and patriotism. They stayed silent.

Adam Kinzinger never wavered in his commitment to put country over party in recognizing the danger Donald Trump posed.

He issued some of the most prescient warnings throughout this dangerous period, including telling the Republican Conference in a call in late December that people who kept making false claims about the ...

Adam was the only other Republican to serve on the January 6t...

Dan Newhouse and I served together on the Rules Committee du...

But he knew that “turning a blind eye to this brutal assault on our republic is not an option.”

Fred Upton understood perhaps better than anyone what the political cost of his impeachment vote would be. He’d been in Congress the longest and had chaired the powerful House Committee on Energy and Commerce, but his experience also informed his recognition of the danger Trump posed.

John Katko was a former federal prosecutor and the ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee.

He turned to me and said, “No job can ever be more important than our oath to the Constitution.”

David Valadao, whose California congressional district borders Kevin McCarthy’s, disagreed with the timing of the vote and the process the Democrats followed.

Unlike other members, however, he refused to use those concerns as a politically expedient excuse to vote against impeachment. Valadao said, “I have to go with my gut and vote my conscience” to impeach Donald Trump for conduct that was ...

He and Dan Newhouse were the only two Republicans who voted to impeach Trump who returned to ...

Anthony Gonzalez’s grandparents escaped from Castro’s Cuba in 1959. He kept their photograph on the wall of his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. No one understood the value and fragility of freedom better than he did. While most of our colleagues were working to find an excuse to vote against impeachment, Gonzalez refused to look away from the truth: “I probably could have found a reason to vot...

For the next few years, we became known both within the Republican Conference and in the press as “the impeachers.”

If there had been a vote on January 13, 2021 for censure and condemnation of Donald Trump, my bet is that we would easily have had more than half the conference, including all of the Republican leadership team. And had the impeachment vote been by secret ballot, it would have been overwhelmingly in favor of impeachment.

The truth was pretty simple. Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago because his ability to raise money had dried up after January 6 when nearly every major corporate donor announced it would stop making campaign contributions to Republicans who had voted to object to the Electoral College votes.

Every time Kevin McCarthy had faced a decision of consequence, he had done the wrong thing. Now Donald Trump was the only one left who would help him.

I thought of what Kevin’s mentor, former Republican Congressman Bill Thomas, had said after January 6. Thomas, a legend in the United States House of Representatives, had represented Kevin’s district for 28 years. After January 6, he was not shy about criticizing Kevin: Thomas called McCarthy a “hypocrite.” “You never know what’s inside [him] really,” Thomas said later. Kevin basically is whatever you want him to be. He lies. He’ll change the lie if necessary. How can anyone trust his word?

had once read a lecture given by historian David McCullough about the US Capitol. He talked about the statue of Clio, muse of history, that stands over the door in Statuary Hall. I reminded my colleagues of what she stood for and why she was there. Clio is depicted riding in the chariot of time, making notes in the book in her hand, as a reminder that what we do in the Capitol Building is written in the pages of history. I said I hoped we could come out of this meeting unified in our commitment to conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of our history and worthy of the mantle of Abraham Lincoln.

Republican Don Bacon took the microphone. Don is a retired Air Force general and an honorable man. He urged us to stop the “circular firing squad.” Only 10 Republicans may have voted in favor of impeachment, he pointed out, yet “dozens and dozens more struggled with it.”

One of the witnesses they were contemplating calling was a Republican member of the House of Representatives, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who had voted to impeach Trump. Jaime had been diligent in considering her impeachment vote. She had taken careful notes, for example, of Kevin McCarthy’s description of a call he had with Donald Trump during the violence on January 6. McCarthy had described this call many times in meetings with other House Republicans. Dozens had heard him tell the story of being evacuated from his office as the rioters were breaking in, including some of the details of the call. Jaime described what happened in several interviews: And he [Kevin McCarthy] said [to President Trump], “You have got to get on TV. You’ve got to get on Twitter. You’ve got to call these people off.” You know what the President said to him? This is as it’s happening. He said, “Well, Kevin, these aren’t my people. You know, these are Antifa.” And Kevin responded and said, “No, they’re your people. They literally just came through my office windows and my staff are running for cover. I mean they’re running for their lives. You need to call them off.” And the President’s response to Kevin to me was chilling. He said, “Well, Kevin, I guess they’re just more upset about the election, you know, theft than you are.”

The conservative policies and principles that had once defined what it meant to be a Republican were being replaced by complete allegiance to one man—who wasn’t actually a conservative. One of the clearest manifestations of this was the lack of any platform for the Republican Party in 2020. In place of the extensive policy document that each party normally adopts every four years, the Republican Party adopted a resolution that simply affirmed, “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” I talked to Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2021. I had served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East when Condi was secretary of state, and I’d known her since she served on the National Security Council staff during George H. W. Bush’s administration. She was an expert on the Soviet Union and a student of history. We discussed the cult of personality that had captured our party. This was something America had never experienced before. I asked Condi if she could think of any historic examples of countries successfully throwing off cults of personality. “Not without great violence and upheaval,” she said.

Two reporters who had interviewed both McCarthy and Trump during this period wrote this: When Trump took to calling McCarthy a “pussy,” McCarthy “responded not by defying the former president but by more or less setting out to prove him right.”

I knew from my time overseas, a free society that abandons the truth—that abandons the rule of law—cannot remain free.

From him, I learned what it means to have the courage of your convictions.

Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 Inaugural address: The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

“Standing up for the truth,” he told me, “honors all who gave all.”

We must all strive to be worthy of the sacrifice of those who have died for our freedom.

I learned later that one of my colleagues, a member of the Freedom Caucus, asked to be recognized after I left. He said he didn’t agree with me on some things, but he thought the conference should thank me for the job I’d done. Garret Graves, a representative from Louisiana, texted me a few minutes later: “You just got a standing O. Seriously.”

Having gotten everything he asked for, Kevin then abruptly withdrew his support for the Thompson-Katko bill. Pelosi and others said it best at the time: Kevin McCarthy would not accept yes for an answer.

34 Wyoming lawyers—including retired judges and Wyoming supreme court justices and three former governors, led by former chief justice of the Wyoming supreme court Marilyn Kite—wrote an op-ed titled “The Rule of Law Matters.”

We are proud of Rep. Cheney’s courage. In the face of calls to lawlessness from high places, she adhered to her solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution… all Wyomingites should applaud her understanding of her duties and her willingness to perform them, irrespective of the personal or political cost she might pay.

Sometimes after I talked through the facts of the 2020 election—including how the courts ruled and what the judges said—people I met with were willing to reconsider their embrace of Trump’s lies. Others remained defiant and angry. It can be tough to learn that you’ve been fooled, tricked by those you trusted. That you let yourself be deceived. The natural reaction is denial, and a refusal to listen to anything to the contrary.

What Donald Trump accomplished was this: Despite mountains of hard evidence to the contrary, he persuaded tens of millions of Americans—some 40 to 50 million in all—that their nation had been stolen from them by election fraud. And Donald Trump convinced some of them to believe it absolutely. As if it were a tenet of faith. For millions, their minds may never change on this.

Today Donald Trump poses a threat that many in Washington simply fail to grasp. He can move Americans to action based on total dishonesty. I can tell you from my time working to support democracy overseas that the power to rally a mob must never be underestimated. Nor should the fear that a mob can instill in people of reason. A person with that kind of power—to intimidate and threaten and motivate others to carry out violent acts—does not just slowly fade into the background.

For Jim Banks, it was purely political.

Jim Banks announced that he would lead a Republican effort to conduct a January 6 investigation of their own. The effort never amounted to much. Banks did, however, send letters requesting documents to a handful of federal agencies, falsely representing in his signature block that he was the “Ranking Member” of the Select Committee. This was, of course, false. I knew that Banks was desperate for attention, but I was shocked that he would claim to be the ranking member of a committee to which he had not even been appointed.

Joe Maher, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, had been appointed by Phil to that position nearly 15 years earlier. Joe is a very skilled lawyer; a University of Chicago Law School graduate, he clerked for well-known conservative Judge E. Grady Jolly in the Fifth Circuit, and he had worked for Gene Scalia when Gene was solicitor at the Department of Labor. Joe is incisive, with a deep understanding of the constitutional principles at issue in the Committee’s work. His appointment to the Committee staff was supported by five prior general counsels of Homeland Security—from both Republican and Democratic administrations. As my senior counsel, Joe Maher was indispensable from the day he started until the day our investigation concluded.

We also persuaded another extremely talented lawyer, John Wood, to come on board. A graduate of Harvard Law School, John had clerked in the Fourth Circuit for a prominent conservative judge, Michael Luttig, as well as for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. John had served as the US Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, and in several other high-ranking positions at the Department of Justice. He had been Phil’s principal deputy in the associate attorney general’s office at DOJ, and later at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Like Joe Maher, John was critical to many aspects of our investigation, notably the conduct of key witness exams, the litigation to secure John Eastman’s emails, and the formulation of the Committee’s criminal referrals.

At the top of that list was my chief of staff, Kara Ahern.

I also asked my communications director, Jeremy Adler, to take on expanded responsibilities.

Will Henderson. Will graduated from Texas Christian University in 2017 and joined my staff in 2018, handling constituent correspondence.

Michael “Sully” Sullivan also provided crucial support for the Select Committee’s work. Sully initially came to work for me in 2019. His capacity for research, analysis, and rapid response is second to none. He processed huge amounts of information in compressed periods of time and is tireless.

Early in 2022, I also persuaded Tom Joscelyn to join the Committee staff. I had first met Tom 20 years earlier, when we were both working on national security policy issues. In the aftermath of 9/11, Tom had taught himself Arabic and become one of the world’s experts on al-Qaeda terrorist networks.

David Buckley served as staff director and ensured that all aspects of the Committee’s work operated efficiently and in a manner that enabled us to fulfill our mandate and complete our work on time.

As chief counsel, Kristin Amerling helped to manage a complex set of issues related to litigation, subpoenas, and our interactions with federal agencies.

Tim Heaphy, who had served as US Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, joined us as chief investigative counsel and managed a sk...