By Carl P. Leubsdorf / The Dallas Morning News

In the four years since mobs of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an unsuccessful effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat, Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have waged an incessant campaign to rewrite the history of one of the most shameful events in modern American history.

Now, as the fourth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising nears, they have sunk to a new and dangerous low by calling for a criminal investigation of former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the main officials who sought to tell the truth about Trump’s role in inciting the insurrection.

In their false version, perpetrated in a new report by one of Trump’s congressional allies and encouraged by the president-elect, the guilty parties are Cheney and the key witnesses to the House panel that laid out Trump’s role in instigating the riot in which five died and hundreds were injured, including many law enforcement officers.

The 128-page “interim report” by Georgia Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk said Cheney should be investigated by the FBI for alleged witness tampering and other purported misdeeds. Her alleged crime: encouraging the truthful testimony of a key witness, former junior White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, about Trump’s activities that day.

The Dec. 17 report called that “illicit and unethical” and contended that “numerous federal laws were likely broken” by Cheney, though lawmakers are constitutionally protected from all but the most egregious crimes while performing their duties. Within hours of its release, Trump weighed in on Truth Social at 3:11 a.m., declaring the former Wyoming congresswoman “could be in a lot of trouble” and adding, “these violations should be investigated by the FBI.’”

It’s the latest sign that Trump meant it when, during the recent campaign, he vowed “vengeance” against those responsible for investigating or prosecuting him, including an array of federal and state prosecutors and the members of the select House committee on which Cheney was one of two Republican members.

He also said he plans to pardon all or most of those convicted of various crimes for their roles in the uprising, often referring to them inaccurately as “patriots.”

Similar calls for “vengeance” have been expressed by Pam Bondi, Trump’s choice for attorney general. After Trump was indicted last year in Georgia on charges of trying to overturn the election, she said on Fox News, “The investigators will be investigated.”

The subject is likely to be raised in her Senate confirmation hearings next month.

A federal grand jury indicted Trump for his role in spurring the Jan. 6 uprising. But, after he won the presidential election, special counsel Jack Smith moved to withdraw the charges, citing long-standing Justice Department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.

“That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind,” he said, making clear he was not absolving Trump.

Smith also withdrew the federal indictments against Trump for improperly taking secret government documents and obstructing the investigation into his unauthorized possession of them.

Cheney denounced Loudermilk’s report as “a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth,” which “intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did.”

She said Jan. 6 showed Trump to be “a cruel and vindictive man who allowed violent attacks to continue against our Capitol and law enforcement officers while he watched television and refused for hours to instruct his supporters to stand down and leave.”

Loudermilk’s allegations stem from the fact that, after Hutchinson’s initial testimony to the panel, she fired her lawyer and provided additional details of what she said she witnessed in the White House that day.

The report claimed Cheney “tampered” with Hutchinson “by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without her attorney’s knowledge.”

Hutchinson’s lawyer, William Jordan, called that “preposterous” and said she “made the independent decision to part ways with her Trump-funded lawyer, freeing her to provide candid, truthful, and honorable testimony to the January 6th Committee about the attack on the Capitol.”

She testified her original attorney, Stefan Passantino, who was provided and paid by the Trump campaign, told her, “The less you remember, the better” and promised, “We’re gonna get you a really good job in Trump world.”

But she said that, after a “moral struggle” and researching the testimony by some key witnesses in the 1973 Watergate scandal investigation, she reached out to the House panel through Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House press aide who had broken with Trump.

When Smith announced he was dropping the cases against Trump, the president-elect claimed victory. “I persevered, against all odds, and WON,” he said in a statement on Truth Social.

But while his months of legal delaying actions enabled Trump to prevent the government from holding him legally responsible for his acts, he cannot escape moral responsibility for what may have been history’s singularly most selfish effort to flout the rules of American democracy.

Now, he seems determined to add to that ugly record by using the office to which the American people have just entrusted him as a tool against his enemies, rather than an instrument for the public good.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Readers may write to him via email at carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com. ©2024 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.