(CNSNews.com) – House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous” on Sunday that the text messages between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page talking about stopping President Donald Trump could amount to treason.
“I think what is crucially important to remember here is that you had Strzok and Page, who were in charge of launching this investigation, and they were saying things like we must stop this president. We need an insurance policy against this president,” Cheney said.
“That, in my view, when you have people that are in the highest echelons of the law enforcement of this nation saying things like that, that sounds an awful lot like a coup, and it could well be treason, and I think that we need to know more,” she said.
"We need to know what was Jim Comey's role in all this? These people reported to him. Andy McCabe, reported to him. What was Comey's role in that? And that is what the attorney general is going to be focused on and should be,” Cheney said.
“Let me talk about this, because you saw what the president did with Attorney General Barr. He said he could declassify all this intelligence. Do you worry that sources and methods might be revealed? Do you have any problems with him saying declassify this intelligence even though he won't give the Mueller report -- an unredacted Mueller report to Congress?” ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked.
“Look, first of all, the Mueller report has been delivered to Congress, every single piece of it that could be within the law. The amount that's been redacted that's available for key officials in Congress to see, the amount that's been redacted, is something like less than 2 percent. So, it has been turned over,” Cheney said.
“Secondly, I have complete confidence in Attorney General Barr in terms of this decision that he's going to make. And thirdly, as I said before, he has to have the ability to look at what happened. Think about what happened,” she said.
“Think about the fact that we had people that are at the highest levels of our law enforcement in this nation saying that they were going to stop a duly elected president of the United States, saying they needed an insurance policy against him. That is something that simply cannot happen,” Cheney said.
She said the people must have confidence in law enforcement, and Barr has to “get to the bottom of what happened, how it was that those people were allowed to misuse and abuse their power that way.”
When asked about the back and forth between Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the congresswoman said what she sees every day “is a speaker of the House who is increasingly losing her grip on the leadership of her conference, and I think you've seen her being increasingly strident.”
“You're seeing her lashing out, and you're looking at the Democrats who had put all their eggs in the basket of the Mueller report hoping that it would provide them evidence they needed to move to impeachment. It didn't,” Cheney said.
“But so now what they're doing is basically taking all the oxygen out of the room, refusing to do any of the things we were elected to do and instead continuing these attacks and partisan investigations, partisan issuance of subpoenas,” she added.