Rep. Liz Cheney, Wyoming Republican, expressed disappointment Sunday over her party’s response to the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s private residence for classified documents.
Ms. Cheney, who lost her primary election last week to a Trump-backed challenger, said criticism of the event by the former president and his supporters is responsible for the violent threats and attacks against the FBI since then.
“I was ashamed to hear Republicans immediately and reflexively attack the FBI agents who executed a search warrant,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I was disgusted when I learned that President Trump had released the names of those agents when he released the unredacted search warrant.”
Far-right Republicans such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona have called for Congress to “defund the FBI.”
Meanwhile, Breitbart News has been slammed for publishing the names of the FBI agents who executed the search warrant.
“That has now caused violence. We’ve seen threats of violence,” Ms. Cheney said. “To see the former president, my colleagues, stoking the flames of that instead of saying we need to learn the facts, we need to learn the evidence, we need to learn the information about what happened.”
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The FBI agents recovered 11 sets of highly classified documents from Mr. Trump’s South Florida home and are investigating him for potential crimes related to the improper removal of documents and obstruction of justice. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Ms. Cheney said it is “dangerous hypocrisy” to “jump reflexively to attack law enforcement and to say then, ’We back the blue.’”
• Ramsey Touchberry can be reached at rtouchberry@washingtontimes.com.
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