McCarthy ally warns GOP consultants they can’t work with Cheney
By Melanie Zanona, CNN
Jeff Miller, a lobbyist and close ally of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, has warned GOP consultants in recent weeks that they can’t work for both McCarthy and Rep. Liz Cheney, a source confirmed to CNN, claiming she is working to undermine the House GOP’s efforts to win back the majority.
One firm hired by Cheney — The Morning Group — informed the Wyoming Republican last month that they can no longer work with her, a separate source told CNN.
Those developments, which were first reported by the New York Times, underscore the nasty and ongoing rift between McCarthy and Cheney, who once worked on the same leadership team before Cheney was removed for repeatedly calling out former President Donald Trump’s election lies.
CNN has reached out to The Morning Group for comment.
McCarthy, through a joint fundraising committee and leadership PAC, has helped raise money for five of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, but Cheney is not one of them. Since her January impeachment vote, Cheney has become one of the most vocal Republican critics of Trump on Capitol Hill and is one of just two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack — something top House Republicans have dismissed as a partisan effort.
In the third fundraising quarter this year, Cheney outraised her Trump-endorsed GOP opponent as well as her fellow House Republicans who backed Trump’s impeachment, bringing in $1.7 million, new filings show. It marked the second-largest fundraising quarter of Cheney’s House career.
During a floor debate on Thursday ahead of the House’s vote to hold Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s closest allies, in criminal contempt of Congress, Cheney went after members of her own party for downplaying the riot and not believing in the panel’s mission.
“There are people in this chamber right now who were evacuated with me and with the rest of us on that day during that attack. People who now seem to have forgotten the danger of the moment, the assault on the Constitution, the assault on our Congress. People who you will hear argue that there is simply no legislative purpose for this committee, for this investigation, or for this subpoena,” Cheney said.
Trump, Cheney added, “persisted, attempting through every manner he could imagine to try to overturn the outcome of the election. And we all saw what happened.”
“The people who attacked this building have told us, on video, on social media and now before the federal courts, exactly what motivated them. They believed what Donald Trump told them: that the election was stolen and they needed to take action.”
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CNN’s Paul LeBlanc contributed to this report.
