Liz Cheney says ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel ‘enabled’ Trump’s ‘criminality’

The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” with her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s new career in media.

“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.

“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”

McDaniel – a member of the powerful Republican Romney family who reportedly dropped the name at Trump’s behest – became RNC chair in 2017.

In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.

Cheney lost her seat in Congress later that year. Kinzinger chose to retire.

McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.

McDaniel’s move to NBC was announced last week. On Sunday, she appeared on Meet the Press, the flagship politics show.

Characterising her support for Trump’s election fraud lies as “taking one for the whole team”, she said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse” and that Biden won “fair and square” – but still claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [with battleground state elections] in 2020”.

A former Meet the