Liz Cheney Fires Back After Newt Gingrich Threatens Jan. 6 Committee Members With 'Risk of Jail'

The House Select Committee investigating the deadly failed insurrection of January 6 was formed after Republicans refused to work with Democrats establishing a bipartisan committee to investigate the attack. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formed the House Select Committee instead, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pulled all of his Republican nominations for the committee once the Speaker rejected two of his appointments, citing their proximity to the events they'd be investigating.

Though two Republicans—Vice Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois—remain on the committee, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly chastised it as a partisan attack designed to target former President Donald Trump, whose election lies incited the riots in the first place.

The Republican former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, even suggested there'd be jail time for the representatives on the committee in a recent interview with Fox News.

Watch below.

Gingrich said:

"You're gonna get a Republican majority in the House, a Republican majority in the Senate, and all those people who've been so tough and so mean and so nasty are gonna be delivered subpoenas for every document, every conversation, every tweet, every email, because I think it's clear that these are people who are literally just running over the law, pursuing innocent people, causing them to spend thousands and thousands of dollars in legal fees for no justification."

He continued:

"It's basically a lynch mob, and unfortunately the Attorney General of the United States has joined that lynch mob and is totally misusing the FBI. And I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all gonna come crashing down and the wolves are gonna find out that they're now sheep, and they're the ones who, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws that they're breaking."

It's unclear what laws Gingrich thinks they've broken. As recently as last week, the Supreme Court—including all three Trump-appointed Justices—upheld the committee's subpoenas for Trump administration documents surrounding the Capitol siege, despite Trump's efforts to block them with claims of executive privilege.

The committee's Vice Chair, Liz Cheney, responded to Gingrich's smears in a tweet saying his comments were the embodiment of "what it looks like when the rule of law unravels."

Social media users agreed.

She wasn't the only one to blast Gingrich for his comments.

For her part, Cheney has already faced political retribution. Though she voted with Trump almost 93 percent of the time, her critiques of Trump's role in an attack on Congress have rendered her persona non grata within the GOP. She lost her position as Conference Chair for House Republicans and has been censured by her home state's Republican party.