Liz Cheney not ruling out White House bid

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Sunday that she is not ruling out a White House bid and vowed to help elect leaders who will fight against future challenges to election results as seen in the 2020 election.

Cheney initially dodged a question about her 2024 plans, telling CNN “State of the Union” anchor Jake Tapper: “I will tell you what I’m definitely going to do — I’m going to spend the next year, between now and the election, certainly helping to elect serious people, helping to elect sane people to Congress.”

When further pressed if she is not ruling out a presidential bid, Cheney said, “No, I’m not.”

Earlier in the interview, Cheney, a staunch critic of former President Trump, was asked if she would vote for President Biden over Trump if it came down to it, despite her opposition to Biden’s policies.

“We’re going to see what happens,” Cheney responded. ‘We’re going to see how things unfold. I think Donald Trump is the single most dangerous threat we face. I would imagine that there will be a number of other candidates in the race that I think —” before Tapper interjected to ask Cheney if she would be one of them.

Cheney further said she would help elect members of both parties, arguing: “I think that we could well find ourselves in a situation, given what we know the Trump folks are doing, in terms of attempting to question the results of the election.”

“We don’t want a situation where the election is thrown into the House of Representatives and Donald Trump has any possibility at all of prevailing under those circumstances,” Cheney continued. “So, we have got to elect people who believe in the Constitution and who take their responsibility seriously to Congress.”

Cheney, who served as vice chairwoman of the House select committee on Jan. 6, did not hold back in her condemnation of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Blaming the former president for provoking the violence that day, the three-term conservative became one of the most outspoken GOP critics of the former president.

Cheney went on to lose her seat to a Trump-backed challenger, now-Rep. Harriet Hageman, in the 2022 Wyoming primaries, a state where Trump maintained wide support among voters.

Since her departure from Congress last fall, Cheney has remained a critic of both Trump and several Republican leaders, most recently blaming former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for the havoc wreaked on the House as a result of his ouster.

In a separate interview Sunday, Cheney further claimed the threats being made against GOP lawmakers over the recent Speaker vote are “absolutely being driven” by Trump and his supporters.

Asked on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” about the threats some lawmakers have faced for not backing former Speaker-designate Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Cheney blamed Trump.

“The domestic threats are absolutely being driven by Donald Trump and, unfortunately, some of his supporters who in fact have encouraged and taken steps that have resulted in — as we saw on Jan. 6 — political violence,” she said.

Several lawmakers who voted against Jordan, who withdrew from consideration Friday, publicly said they’d received death threats.