Donald Trump has renewed calls for Liz Cheney – his most prominent Republican critic – to be jailed for her role in investigating his actions during the January 6 Capitol attack launched by his supporters in 2021, a move that is bound to raise further fears that the former president could persecute his political opponents if given another White House term.
In posts on Sunday on his Truth Social platform, Trump said other members of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack – and concluded he had plotted to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden – should be imprisoned.
Those statements followed Trump’s previous comments that he would act like a “dictator” on the first day of a second presidency if given one by voters.
Cheney, who served as vice-chair of the January 6 committee and was one of two Republicans on the panel, lost her seat in the House of Representatives to a Trump-backed challenger, Harriet Hageman, in 2022. She responded later on Sunday, saying her fellow Republican Trump was “afraid of the truth”.
Trump has been charged with four felonies in relation to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. The US supreme court is considering Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity from prosecution in the case because he served as president from 2017 to 2021.
Trump is also facing charges of 2020 election interference in Georgia, retention of government secrets after he left the Oval Office and hush-money payments that were illicitly covered up.
On Sunday, Trump wrote that Cheney should “go to jail along with the rest” of the select January 6 House committee, which he sought to insult in his post on Truth Social by calling it the “unselect committee”.
Trump founded Truth after he was temporarily banned from Twitter – now known as X – in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.
In a separate Truth Social post, Trump linked to an article written by Kash Patel, a White House staffer in Trump’s administration. In the article, published on the rightwing website the Federalist, Patel claimed that Cheney and the committee “suppressed evidence” which “completely exonerates Trump” from charges that he had a hand in the January 6 insurrection.
Patel, who was chief of staff in the defense department under Trump, said in December that if the former president was re-elected, his administration would “come after the people in the media” who had reported on Trump’s attempts to remain in power.
Trump wrote: “She [Cheney] should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country! She illegally destroyed the evidence. Unreal!!!”
The suggestions that Cheney and others should be targeted for their role in the January 6 investigation came after House Republicans released a report that they claim contradicts the testimony that Trump tried to grab the wheel of his presidential limousine on January 6 in his excitement to join his supporters attacking the Capitol.
Cheney was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the attack, which has been linked to nine deaths and sought to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
After a series of retirements and Trump-backed primary challenges, only two of those Republicans remain in office.
Cheney’s father, former US vice-president Dick Cheney, released a video in 2022 urging Republicans to reject Trump.
“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big,” Dick Cheney, who served as George W Bush’s vice-president, said in the video.
