The Cheneys

I'm a little puzzled at Dick and Liz Cheney. The Buish dynasty's time has come and gone, the Bush family itself seems to have decided to keep quiet, but the Cheneys are raging on. Last week, "Sleazy" Liz Cheney Loses It After Bombshell Report Claims She "Suppressed Exonerating Evidence" With J6 Committee, The story refers to a Mollie Hemingway piece in The Federalist that claims she helped the January 6 committee suppress exculpatory evidence for Trump:

Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.

Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.

. . . Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review.

According to Wikipedia,

She represented Wyoming's at-large congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2017 to 2023, and served as chair of the House Republican Conference—the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership—from 2019 to 2021. Cheney is known for her vocal opposition to former President Donald Trump.

. . . She was once considered one of the leaders of the Republican Party's neoconservative wing, and was critical of the foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration while consistently voting in favor of Trump's overall agenda.

However,

Because of her stance on the Capitol riot, her impeachment vote, and her opposition to Trump's false stolen-election narrative, pro-Trump Freedom Caucus members of the House Republican Conference twice attempted to remove her from party leadership. With House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy supporting her removal, Cheney was removed from her position in May 2021.In July 2021, Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Cheney to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. Two months later, she was made vice chair of the committee. As a consequence of her service on the Select Committee, Cheney's membership in the Wyoming Republican Party was revoked in November 2021. She was censured by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in February 2022.

On August 16, 2022, Cheney lost renomination in Wyoming's Republican primary to Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman in a landslide, garnering just 28.9% of the vote.

Among other things, this suggests that Trump's influence in the Republican Party even while out of office has been underrated. And generally, Liz Cheney's star has waxed and waned with the influence of the Bushes and her father; she carried little weight on her own. Wikipedia:

Cheney worked for the State Department for five years and the United States Agency for International Development between 1989 and 1993. After 1993, she took a job at Armitage Associates LLP, the consulting firm founded by Richard Armitage, then a former Defense Department official and later the Deputy Secretary of State.

. . . In 2002, Cheney was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, a preexisting vacant post with an "economic portfolio", a mandate to promote investment in the region.

. . . After two years, Cheney left her State Department post in 2003 to work for the Bush–Cheney 2004 reelection campaign. She participated in the campaign's "W Stands for Women" initiative to target female voters.

. . . On February 14, 2005, she returned to the U.S. State Department and was appointed principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives.

She lasted another year at the State Department until Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary at the time, dissolved her area of responsibility in response to adverse press reports. Her father as vice president seems to have been unable to secure other work for her in the State Department, and it's hard to avoid thinking the jobs she held there were effectively sinecures.

In June 2007 Cheney signed on as one of three national co-chairs of Fred Thompson's 2008 presidential campaign. . . . After Thompson dropped out of the race, Cheney joined Mitt Romney's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy advisor.

After that, she seems to have had a series of failed career attempts, ranging from founding a short-lived advocacy group with William Kristol and Deborah Burlingame, to guest-hosting on Fox News, to a failed primary bid for the Republican-held Senate seat in Wyoming. Only in 2016 did she succeed in running for a House seat, but by 2021, she'd managed to ruin her career prospects as a Republican. By May of that year, it emerged

Rep. Liz Cheney secretly masterminded an extraordinary Washington Post op-ed authored by top military leaders, just three days before the Capitol riot, it has been claimed.

The letter published in the Washington Post contained a stark warning from 10 Defense Secretaries from both parties.

. . . The letter from the Defense Secretaries stated that the time for questioning election results 'has passed' and said involving the military in electoral disputes would take the nation into 'unlawful and unconstitutional territory.'

It was a key break as members of the military, lawmakers, and retired statesmen issued public statements in an effort to promote a transition in power despite Trump's refusal to concede the election.

'She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,' Eric Edelman, a friend of Cheney's and career diplomat who served as national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, told the New Yorker. 'It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.'

But it's hard to avoid she was also casting about for a new career option, given Trump's electoral loss, her limited ability to work with other Republicans in the House, and her father's diminishing influence in the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, Trump's prospects continue to improve -- in part, that's because he can use figures like Liz Cheney as foils.