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Republican who challenged Liz Cheney for a leadership role in the party on Thursday reiterated Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election remains in doubt, in a sign of how loyalty to the former president has become the fire test to advance within the group.
Elise Stefanik, a 36-year-old New York woman, takes charge of being elected the next speaker of the Republican conference in the House of Representatives amid calls to remove Cheney from office for her refusal to accept allegations of theft from the elections.
Trump on Wednesday approved Stefanik’s role, which would make her the party’s biggest woman on Capitol Hill, calling her a “tough, smart communicator.” He attacked Cheney as “a warlike fool who has no business in the leadership of the Republican party,” in a statement issued by his Save America political action committee.
Stefanik appeared Thursday in a podcast hosted by Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, and said he was “totally” in favor of Republican efforts to audit election results in Arizona, a state Biden won in November. Trump and his allies have tried to question the poll despite multiple stories.
Trump forgave Bannon shortly before leaving the White House after federal prosecutors in New York accused the strategist of swindling hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters.
“Transparency is good,” Stefanik told Bannon. “We have to solve these electoral security problems.”
Cheney weight that disappears underscores Trump’s persistent influence in the Republican Party six months after his election loss to Joe Biden.
A staunch neoconservative and daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, she has said she would not support Trump if he ran again in the White House in 2024.
The 54-year-old Wyoming Republican voted to prosecute Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead and has since repeatedly spoken out against the former president, saying Republicans should accept election results.
After months of hemorrhagic support from fellow Republicans, Cheney is expected to be fired from his leadership role as the third House Republican as early as next week.
Stefanik, whose predominantly rural district includes much of the northern rural country of New York State, has campaigned openly to fill the vacancy created by the likely defenestration of Cheney.
A graduate of Harvard University who worked at George W Bush’s White House and later advised former House Speaker Paul Ryan, Stefanik became a vocal advocate for Trump during the first indictment investigation. trades against him in 2019. The research focused on the then president’s efforts to get the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Biden and his family.
In a quick blow to Cheney, Stefanik told Bannon that the Republican party was “a team and that means working with the president,” referring to Trump, not Biden.
Cheney, meanwhile, has shown no signs of backing down, despite losing the support of Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the number one and House Republicans, respectively.
In a op. ed published Wednesday afternoon in the Washington Post, Cheney warned that his party was “at a turning point,” adding, “Republicans must decide whether we will choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”
“It simply came to our notice then. Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to uphold the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process, ”Cheney wrote. “I am committed to doing so, whatever the short-term political consequences.”
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