Cheney criticizes Youngkin, others campaigning for election deniers

Several other Republicans who previously tried to distance themselves from Trump’s “big lie” — including former vice president Mike Pence and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley — have also recently campaigned with pro-Trump candidates who have questioned or denied the results of the 2020 election.

“I think they are really indefensible decisions,” Cheney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “I think that Glenn Youngkin has done a good job as governor of Virginia, but nobody should be out advocating for the election of people who will not honor the sanctity of our elections process. And, you know, people who do that are in fact putting politics ahead of the Constitution and ahead of the country.”

Lake and the GOP candidate for Arizona secretary of state, Mark Finchem, have repeatedly falsely claimed that Trump was the winner of the 2020 election. On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Lake declined to say whether she would take steps to limit early voting and mail-in voting in Arizona if elected, and continued to push falsehoods about the 2020 election.

Republicans promoting such election deniers were putting short-term party gain over their obligation to defend the Constitution, Cheney said.

“They [Lake and Finchem] have both said, ‘We’ve looked at all of the facts, we’ve looked at the results of the election in 2020, we’ve looked at the law, we’ve looked at the fact that the courts all ruled against Donald Trump, we’ve looked at the audits and the recounts. We are willing to ignore all of that, and we are saying we would not have certified that election,’ ” Cheney said. “They’re telling you that they’ll only certify an election they agree with. And there’s not much graver threat to the democracy you can imagine than that.”

Cheney’s latest warnings are perhaps one of her last efforts, while still in office, to try to prevent Trump and his supporters from subsuming the Republican Party. For more than a year, Cheney has served as the vice chair of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, issuing one stark warning after another about Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election at all costs. Last week, the committee voted unanimously to issue a subpoena for Trump to provide documents about those efforts and to testify under oath next month.

“As demonstrated in our hearings, we have assembled overwhelming evidence, including from dozens of your former appointees and staff, that you personally orchestrated and oversaw a multipart effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and to obstruct the peaceful transition of power,” Cheney and the chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), said in a letter to Trump that accompanied the subpoena.

But Cheney’s efforts have come at significant political cost: She was ousted last May from her position as House conference chair after persistently criticizing Trump. Her GOP colleagues voted to replace her with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who had a more moderate voting record but who echoed Trump’s false claims the election was stolen. In August, Cheney lost her primary race in Wyoming to Harriet Hageman, another election denier, by a historic margin. On Sunday, Cheney acknowledged the Jan. 6 committee’s work probably would be stopped if Republicans regain control of the House.

“If we were in a nation where our politics were operating the way they should, the investigation would proceed no matter what,” she said. “I think that the Republicans have made very clear that they’re not interested in getting to the bottom of what happened or holding people to account. And I think that also ought to be something that Americans across the country are paying attention to.”

Cheney has not ruled out a third-party run for president, saying she would do “whatever it takes” to try to block Trump from the Oval Office again. She also continued Sunday to express disappointment in most of her Republican colleagues for not, in her opinion, doing the right thing “when the chips were down.”

If Trump were to become the GOP’s presidential nominee again in 2024, Cheney predicted the party would “shatter.”

“I think that the party has either got to come back from where we are right now, which is a very dangerous, toxic place, or the party will splinter and there will be a new conservative party that rises,” she said.

Robert Klemko and Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.