Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning

by Liz Cheney

The end of this story hasn’t yet been written. The threat continues. The outcome now is in the hands of the American people and our system of justice.

So strong is the lure of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump had been told repeatedly by his top campaign advisers, including on Election Day itself, that early returns on Election Night could show him leading initially, but that those numbers were likely to change as absentee and mail-in votes were counted. This happened in every presidential election.

McCarthy appeared to be dealing in reality. This made it all the more surprising when I saw his appearance on Fox News just a few hours later: “President Trump won this election,” Kevin proclaimed, “so everyone who is listening, do not be quiet! Do not be silent about this! We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” McCarthy knew that what he was saying was not true.

Giuliani had led New York City as our nation recovered from the attacks of 9/11. I had visited the remains of the World Trade Towers with him in the weeks after the attack. Now, as I watched the press conference, I kept thinking how far Rudy Giuliani had fallen. How had we gotten to a point that a spectacle like this was being held on behalf of the President of the United States?

transition is crucial. No lame-duck president focused on securing the nation would replace his top civilian leaders at DOD days after losing an election. Yet that’s what Trump was doing.

The hair dye dripping down his face made it challenging to focus on what Rudy was saying. But as he introduced Sidney Powell, he made this attention-grabbing pronouncement: “I don’t think most Americans know that our ballots get calculated, many of them, outside the United States… and it’s being done by a company that specializes in voter fraud.” According to Giuliani, America had used “largely a Venezuelan voting machine, in essence, to count our vote… [if] we let this happen, we are going to become Venezuela.” What is he talking about? I thought. Was Sidney Powell going to provide evidence for this claim?

It quickly became apparent, even to hard-core Trump supporters such as Tucker Carlson, that Sidney Powell had no evidence to back up her claims. Three days after the press conference, Ellis and Giuliani issued a statement saying Sidney Powell was “not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

I heard from many constituents that they believed I was “going after Trump” and that I was betraying Wyoming. Emotions were running high. Some of the anger stemmed from desperation about the damage Biden policies might do to our state. Our biggest industries—fossil fuels and ranching—are profoundly impacted by policies set in Washington, DC. The federal government owns nearly 50 percent of the land in Wyoming, as well as two-thirds of the state’s subsurface minerals. Whether the issue was grazing cattle on public lands, securing permits for oil and gas leasing, or sustaining our coal industry, there was a widespread sense that a Biden administration would impose policies that would ruin people’s lives.

Donald Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, had had enough of what he later called “bullshit” election claims. Barr told the Associated Press that the Department of Justice had been investigating the allegations of fraud, and “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” This made Trump so angry that he reportedly threw his lunch at a wall in the White House. Undeterred, the next day Trump posted a 45-minute speech to Facebook, repeating his false claims of election fraud.

But the amicus-brief episode revealed a side of Mike I had not seen before. He appeared especially susceptible to flattery from Trump and aspired to being anywhere in Trump’s orbit.

Everything could have ended at this juncture. Nearly every one of Donald Trump’s senior advisers thought he should concede. Instead, Trump resolved to escalate this into what soon became a constitutional crisis. 4.

The Electoral College met in all 50 states on Monday, December 14, to formally cast their votes for president and vice president. As had been clear for weeks, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won, and it was not even close. Many Republicans in the House and Senate—including Wyoming senators Mike Enzi, John Barrasso, and I—issued statements affirming that the election was over.

McEntee’s calls leave little doubt that Donald Trump was in fact considering deploying our military for some election-related purpose. These calls, and McEntee’s note, also coincided with a now-famous White House meeting on December 18.

In the early hours of December 19, when the meeting finally ended, Donald Trump summoned his supporters to Washington, DC, tweeting: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

I believe that Donald Trump’s decision to attack the lawfully certified Electoral College results and to ignore the rulings of our courts was an assault on the structural constitutional safeguards that keep us free.

The simple conclusion: Congress does not have the authority to undo an election by refusing to count state-certified electoral votes. Period.

Nothing in the Constitution remotely says that Congress is the court of last resort, with the authority to second-guess and invalidate state and federal court judicial rulings in election challenges.

ON DECEMBER 26, AS PHIL and I worked on our memo, a column by Washington Post reporter David Ignatius caught my attention. Ignatius, a longtime journalist who was well-sourced at the Pentagon, reported that senior government officials feared that Trump was “threatening to overstep the constitutional limits on his power.” One possibility Ignatius reported was that Trump might attempt to stay in power by using violence on January 6 as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act.

By the end of December, it was clear that privately urging Trump to do the right thing was fruitless. He didn’t care. I had had several firsthand experiences of sitting in the Oval Office, calmly trying to tell Donald Trump what he did not want to hear. I knew how he would respond. A private approach would not work. We needed a public warning to Trump, and to his new appointees at the Pentagon. And it needed to come from a leader or group of leaders who could not easily be ignored.

I explained why we had no authority to object to electoral votes. And I stressed to members that this was likely the most consequential vote we would ever cast. The election was over. Trump had had his day in court and lost. The Electoral College had met and voted. We had a single certified slate of electors signed by the governor of each state. Objecting to these electors would be claiming for Congress the right to overturn elections and select the president. Nothing in the Constitution gave us that authority. Those who were objecting might be trying to tell themselves it was no big deal, but in reality it could not have been a bigger deal. We could not act in a way that we knew to be contrary to the Constitution. I urged all our members to think very carefully about the ramifications of objecting to electoral votes.

As members continued to press him, Kevin adopted a surprising approach: He lashed out at those asking for his view. Referring to the individualized card each member of Congress uses to cast their votes in the machines on the House floor, Kevin suggested anyone asking for his view should hand over their voting card. “If you’re so concerned with what I think,” he bristled, “why don’t you just give me your voting cards? I’d be happy to vote for you.”

Objecting was the safe thing politically. It would keep Trump happy, and, besides, what harm could it do? McCarthy was also describing the potential political cost to members who refused to object—telling them he would be unable to protect them from primary-election challenges.

The senators cited a poll showing that 39 percent of Americans believed “the election was rigged.” In other words, these 11 senators were taking the position that because Donald Trump had successfully spread falsehoods about election fraud, and because a poll showed many people believed those falsehoods, Congress could refuse to do what the Constitution explicitly required.

As is typical for Cruz, he was grandstanding for his own benefit. It was one of the worst cases of abandonment of duty for personal ambition I’ve ever seen in Washington.

we worried that a bomb threat or some other tactic might be used to halt the count. Phil mentioned the security measures that had been put in place around the White House in the aftermath of 9/11.

At about 1:00 in the afternoon of the 3rd, audio of President Trump’s January 2 phone call with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, became public. This was the infamous call in which Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip the state from Biden to Trump. To his credit, Raffensperger calmly resisted every effort Trump made, explaining point by point why Trump was wrong—even when Trump suggested that Raffensperger and his counsel were risking criminal liability.

JENNA ELLIS KICKED OFF THE January 4 Trump “surrogate” call with a claim that seven states had “dueling slates of electors.” This was a dangerous lie.

Ellis gave some examples of what Pence could say. For example, she suggested, Pence might announce, “I don’t have in front of me a certification from these states”

Ellis’s description of what they anticipated the vice president would do was alarming: Was Mike Pence really going to stand at the dais in the House of Representatives and try to steal the 2020 election?

Pausing, Miller said, “What’s the harm? What are the Democrats so afraid of?” The harm? How about the shattering chaos that would ensue if the vice president refused to count certified electoral votes? We would be in completely uncharted territory. We would have no playbook. Having just lost a lawfully certified election, Trump was attempting to seize power unconstitutionally. If Pence had gone along, as one of the January 6 Select Committee witnesses later suggested, the conflict would very likely have been settled in the streets.

I hoped Vice President Pence would not abandon his oath. I didn’t trust Donald Trump or my colleagues who had been conspiring with him. The description by Jenna Ellis and Jason Miller of what Trump and his campaign were urging Pence to do made it clear: We needed to be prepared.

Only later did I understand that the fake electoral slates were not in the mahogany boxes that were carried through the Capitol and into the House chamber for the count.

As I left the Capitol on the evening of January 4, I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I kept replaying in my mind the discussions of the last few days. There was little doubt about what was happening: Donald Trump was trying to prevent Congress from fulfilling our constitutional duty. He was trying to seize power through illegal and unconstitutional means. And some of my Republican colleagues were helping him.

Johnson was asserting that Congress should—absent any constitutional authority, or legal or factual basis—reject the rulings of the courts and throw out the duly certified electors from each of these states. He admitted that Congress had no “express authority or ability to independently prove the many allegations of fraud in the four subject states,” but then asserted, “Since we are convinced the election laws in certain states were changed in an unconstitutional manner, the slates of electors produced under those modified laws are thus unconstitutional.”

there was an additional flaw in Mike’s argument: Why was he objecting only to electors from states that Biden had won? Voting rules in other states, such as Texas and North Carolina, had also been changed because of Covid. If this was a violation of the US Constitution, why then was Johnson objecting only to states where Trump had been defeated?

Did members really think that a debate about objections on the House floor tomorrow would satisfy the droves of people descending on the city? How long, Gallagher wanted to know, will it be before we are prepared to tell these people the election is over? Gallagher thought this was a powder keg. So did I.

That night, Eric Trump, the president’s son, appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News. He said there would be consequences for any member who did not do what his father wanted, threatening that “any senator or any congressman… that does not fight tomorrow… their political career is over.”

“Kevin knows this is unconstitutional, but Trump has threatened him, so he feels he has to object and wants as many people with him as possible.” I agreed it was disgusting.

Al Gore’s concession speech was both gracious and patriotic—one of the best concession speeches ever given by a presidential candidate.

But by January 6, 2021, Donald Trump had consumed a good portion of almost every day in a rage: inventing and spreading lies about election fraud, preying on the patriotism of his supporters, and telling them they had to “fight like hell” if they wanted to save their country.

He had summoned them to Washington for a “big protest” on the day of the congressional vote count, promising them it would be “wild.”

While I was sitting at Ryan’s desk, my dad called me. “Are you listening to Trump?” he asked. Trump was speaking at a rally on the Ellipse, but I hadn’t been listening. “He just told the crowd they should ‘get rid of the Liz Cheneys of the world.’ He has created a serious threat to your security.”

My dad’s voice was steady—and deadly serious. I knew he was angry and worried as a father, and I knew that his heart was breaking for our country. The president of the United States was attempting to utilize an angry crowd as a weapon to threaten Congress, to prevent us from carrying out our constitutional duty.

Speaker Pelosi’s security detail evacuated her. This development was live-tweeted by Lauren Boebert: “The Speaker has been removed from the chambers.” It seemed to some of my colleagues that Boebert was rooting for the rioters to succeed. Was she updating them on their progress so far?

As I sat back down, Raskin was still opposite me, looking down at his phone. “Liz,” he said, “there is a Confederate flag flying inside the United States Capitol.” I couldn’t believe it. That hadn’t happened, even during the Civil War. “My God, Jamie—what have they done?” We later learned that, at this same time, senior staff in the White House were begging President Donald Trump to tell the rioters to halt the violence and leave the Capitol Building. He refused.

As the officer concluded his announcement, the unmistakable sound of rioters pounding on doors outside the chamber was getting louder and louder. Inside, Capitol Police were slamming doors shut and locking them. We were being locked in.

There was an awful din in the chamber by this point. As the whine of the gas masks mingled with the sounds of members calling loved ones and preparing to fight the mob, the pounding outside the doors seemed to grow louder. I remember thinking it sounded like the mob had a battering ram. Their jeering violent shouts and chants were echoing off the marble hallways outside the chamber.

People began yelling: “Shots fired! Shots fired! Get down!” A member of Congress, his voice filled with fury, yelled at the mob, “Stop it! You sons of bitches, stop!” “They won’t listen,” someone told him in response. There was only one person they would have listened to—the man who provoked this attack; the man who mobilized the violent mob and sent them to the Capitol; the man who for months fed his supporters lies that the election had been stolen from him; the man who told them that they had to fight like hell to save their country. That man was sitting in his dining room at the White House two miles away watching television coverage of the attack on the United States Capitol. Donald Trump refused to tell his mob to leave.

The plainclothes officer drew his weapon and issued multiple warnings for the mob to get back, to stop attempting to break through. Ashli Babbitt, wrapped in a Trump flag, ignored the warnings and began climbing through the broken window into the Speaker’s lobby. The officer fired. Babbitt can be seen on video falling backward just as law-enforcement officers in tactical gear arrived.