Republican Party Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming said Sunday that former President Donald Trump will be held accountable for the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
Per Raw Story , speaking with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, Cheney said that she expects “many, many criminal investigations” into Trump’s role in the riots.
On the day of the riots, Trump held a rally in Washington, D.C., apparently telling his supporters to storm the Capitol building and stop the certification of Electoral College votes in the 2020 presidential election.
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump over his involvement in the violent protests, claiming that he deliberately incited an insurrection against the U.S. government.
Cheney told Wallace that if she were a senator she would look at the evidence and determine whether to acquit or convict Trump, but suggested that criminal probes are more important than the Senate trial.
“The Senate trial is snapshot. There’s a massive criminal investigation underway. There will be a massive criminal investigation of everything that happened on January 6 and in the days before.”
Cheney said that the American people deserve to know “exactly what” Trump was doing in the hours leading up to the storming of the Capitol. She pointed to his tweets against former Vice President Mike Pence as evidence that he may have participated in a “premeditated effort to provoke violence.”
“There are a lot of questions that have to be answered and there will be many, many criminal investigations looking at every aspect of this and everyone who was involved,” Cheney said.
The congresswoman stressed that Trump’s behavior was unprecedented in American history and that he needs to be held accountable for it.
“We’ve never seen that kind of assault by a president of the United States on another branch of government and that can never happen again,” she stated.
Cheney was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. The congresswoman has faced intense pressure over her vote, with the Wyoming Republican Party passing a motion to censure her. Local party leaders said that the organization will “withhold any future political funding” from Cheney and called on her to resign.
It remains to be seen if criminal investigations will show that Trump incited an insurrection against the federal government, but he is all but certain to be acquitted by the Senate. As CNN reported, an overwhelming majority of Republican senators recently voted for a motion introduced by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul that deemed the impeachment process unconstitutional.