DEFENDING THE REPUBLIC IS THE FAMILY BUSINESS:

"Cheney's rupture with the House Republican Conference has become all but final in recent days, but it has been months in the making. Edelman revealed that Cheney herself secretly orchestrated an unprecedented op-ed in the Washington Post by all ten living former Defense Secretaries, including her father, warning against Trump's efforts to politicize the military," Glasser reported.

"The congresswoman not only recruited her father but personally asked others, including Trump's first Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, to participate. 'She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,' Edelman said. 'It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.' The Post op-ed appeared on January 3rd, just three days before the insurrection at the Capitol," she reported.

It wasn't the only action she took.

"Little noticed at the time was another Cheney effort to combat Trump's post-election lies, a twenty-one-page memo written by Cheney and her husband, Phil Perry, an attorney, and circulated on January 3rd to the entire House Republican Conference. In it, Cheney debunked Trump's false claims about election fraud and warned her colleagues that voting to overturn the election results, as Trump was insisting, would 'set an exceptionally dangerous precedent.' But, of course, they did not listen. Even after the storming of the Capitol, a hundred and forty-seven Republican lawmakers voted against accepting the election results," Glaser wrote.

The joint letter was signed by Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Mark Esper, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, Leon Panetta, William Perry and Donald Rumsfeld.

Tweet   @brothersjudd