Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, blasted the leak of the names of FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property.
Prominent Republicans, including Trump, have spent the last two weeks chastising the FBI for searching his Palm Beach, Florida, home on August 8 and seizing official documents. Following the search, the FBI received an “unprecedented” number of threats.
Cheney stated on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Republicans were still “stoking the flames” despite the rising threats.
“This is a really dangerous moment and to see the former president of the United States, 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,'” Cheney told ABC co-anchor, Jonathan Karl.
“To jump reflexively to attack law enforcement and to say then, ‘Well, we back the blue, but we’re going to attack these people for doing their job,'” she continued. “I think that the American people see what hypocrisy that is and it’s dangerous hypocrisy.”
Cheney was “ashamed” that Republicans spent time going after the FBI agents who carried out the search warrant.
“I was disgusted when I learned that President Trump had released the names of those agents when he released the unredacted search warrant, and that has now caused violence,” Cheney said. Cheney did not provide evidence for her claim that Trump was behind the release of the agents’ names.
Three days after the raid, the conservative news site Breitbart News published an unredacted version of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, which includes the names of FBI officers who participated in the search. The site was accused of spreading false information about the agents.
Some people, including a national security lawyer and a CNN correspondent, speculated that Trump or someone close to him may have released the unredacted warrant, although no evidence has emerged to back up this idea.
“Liz Cheney just suffered one of the most devastating and embarrassing losses in political history, but it appears that hasn’t stopped her from literally making up stories to stay relevant,” Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich told Insider.