Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) on Sunday said she stood by her vote to impeach then-President Donald Trump last month after her state’s GOP censured her over the move on Saturday.
“The oath that I took to the Constitution compelled me to vote for impeachment,” said Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House. “And it doesn’t bend to partisanship. It doesn’t bend to political pressure. It’s the most important oath that we take.”
Cheney was one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump following the deadly insurrectionist mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
In its censure resolution, the Wyoming Republican Party called on Cheney to immediately resign and return any 2020 campaign donations she received from the group. Only eight members of the state GOP’s 74-person central committee opposed the measure.
Cheney told “Fox News Sunday” that she has no intentions of resigning and said the Wyoming GOP falsely believe Black Lives Matter protesters and antifa members were behind the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“People in the party are mistaken,” Cheney said. “They believe that BLM and antifa were behind what happened here at the Capitol. That’s just simply not the case. It’s not true.”
“People have been lied to,” she added. “The extent to which the president, President Trump, for months leading up to Jan. 6 spread the notion that the election had been stolen or that the election was rigged ― was a lie.”
Cheney has faced calls from fellow GOP House members to step down as chair of the House Republican Conference. However, on Wednesday, House Republicans voted 145-61 to allow her to remain in her leadership role.
When asked whether she would vote to convict Trump if she were a member of the Senate, Cheney wouldn’t say, stating only that she would listen to the evidence as a juror. She added that the Senate trial was only a “snapshot” and that there would be “many, many criminal investigations” into the Capitol attack.
“People will want to know exactly what the president was doing,” she told Fox News. “They will want to know, for example, whether the tweet that he sent out calling Vice President Pence a coward while the attack was underway, whether that tweet, for example, was a premeditated effort to provoke violence.”
“We’ve never seen that kind of assault by the president of the United States on another branch of government,” she continued, adding: “This is not something we can simply look past or pretend didn’t happen or try to move on. We’ve got to make sure this never happens again.”
Watch Cheney’s full interview with “Fox News Sunday” below: