Liz Cheney Predicted the Jan 6 Bomb Threat

Despite airing concerns that explosives might disrupt the proceedings on January 6, Liz Cheney did not investigate the presence of two pipe bombs found near the Capitol that day.

Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) will be best remembered for her role as vice chair of the Democratic Party’s January 6 Select Committee, a position that emerged as part of what she described as her mission to “intervene and stop” President Donald Trump.

Cheney's vote to impeach Trump a week after the events of January 6, 2021 resulted in her ouster as Republican conference chair in 2021 and a decisive 40-point defeat in her 2022 primary race. But Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi temporarily saved Cheney from the political wilderness by giving her a top spot on the committee in contravention to House rules; by doing so, Pelosi buried a longstanding hatchet between herself and the Cheney family.

Instead, Dick Cheney’s daughter became Pelosi’s hatchetman.

In another odd turn of fate, Cheney now finds herself in the hot seat following shocking disclosures by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (GA-11), chairman of the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee tasked with conducting a separate investigation into the J6 committee’s work and overall events of that day. A recent report issued by Loudermilk detailed Cheney’s misconduct and influence over the J6 committee, prompting some GOP legislators and the incoming president to call for a criminal investigation into Cheney for potential witness tampering and other offenses.

Cheney’s behavior before January 6, however, also merits scrutiny. Oddly, she appears to have been the first official to predict that a bomb could disrupt the joint session that day—a scenario she had contemplated on at least three separate occasions leading up to that day.

Her fears proved accurate, but she inexplicably dropped the matter during her committee’s 18-month long investigation into the events of Jan 6.

Cheney’s Uncanny Clairvoyance

Cheney’s earliest vision occurred on December 12, 2020, while watching coverage of pro-Trump rallies in Washington, D.C., from her laptop. According to The Washington Post, Cheney’s thoughts "flashed forward to January 6," as she "imagined a bomb threat halting the count to certify the election.”

Her concerns intensified in mid-to-late December as House Republicans discussed plans to contest the election results. During this period, she claimed she was reading Ted Widmer’s Lincoln on the Verge, which documented President Abraham Lincoln’s trip to Washington for his inauguration. In her memoir, Oath and Honor, Cheney drew parallels to 1861 when pro-Southern militias gathered in the nation’s capital potentially to invade the Capitol and halt the certification of President Lincoln’s election. She reflected on the tense atmosphere—heightened by fears that Vice President John Breckinridge, who was to preside over the proceedings, might not acknowledge Lincoln's victory—and compounded by nightly bomb searches in the Capitol's basement.

“This made for chilling reading in December of 2020,” Cheney remarked. "What did President Trump expect to do with the crowd of supporters he was summoning to Washington? Would they try to disrupt or delay the electoral count on January 6? How? Would there be a bomb threat? If someone called in a bomb threat and the Capitol was evacuated, were arrangements in place for Congress to meet somewhere else?”

Soothsayer Cheney once again proved prescient; lawmakers were evacuated to Fort McNair Army base after protesters entered the Capitol on January 6.

Cheney also raised the possibility of explosives near the Capitol during a January 2, 2021, phone call with then-Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen. She and her husband, Philip Perry, an attorney and alum of the George W. Bush administration, called Rosen to express their concerns that "a bomb threat or some other tactic might be used to halt the count.” During the conversation, Perry cited post-9/11 security measures around the Bush White House; Rosen reassured the couple that additional security resources would be available at a nearby military base if needed.

Newsweek later reported over that very same weekend, Rosen, without formal requests from law enforcement or external agencies, unilaterally activated long-standing contingency plans designed to address a terrorist attack involving a weapon of mass destruction—the exact scenario Cheney had warned him about. Elite government special operations teams, including the FBI’s Hostage Rescue and “Render Safe” teams, an ATF Special Response Team, and the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group, were pre-deployed and on alert over the weekend of January 2-3 staging at the FBI Academy complex in Quantico.

On January 6, Cheney's predictions of doom materialized when the two pipe bombs were found near the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee, both just blocks from the Capitol, on January 6 just as the joint session of Congress convened to debate the election outcome. Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund testified to Congress in February 2021 to explain that he believed the timing and location of the pipe bombs' discovery diverted "extensive resources" from the Capitol. This diversion coincided with a mass influx of protesters approaching its grounds, offering a narrow window of opportunity for a few bad actors to initiate a large-scale attack.

The ensuing chaos ended Republicans’ plans that day to expose voting fraud related to the 2020 presidential election—precisely the outcome Cheney had wanted.

Yet her committee’s lack of interest represented a sharp contrast to Cheney’s panic over a potential bomb scare on January 6. The investigation she led inexplicably failed to conduct any substantive inquiry into the threat posed by the still at-large mystery MAGA bomber. In fact, the committee’s 836-page report devoted roughly two-and-a-half pages to the pipe bomb incidents and was relegated to an appendix.

More Odd Coincidences with the Secret Service

In her memoir, Cheney also highlighted her long-standing relationships with both current and former Secret Service officials who protected her family, emphasizing the close ties she has maintained with many of them for nearly two decades. Days before January 6, she sought “security advice” from one former agent, who then assisted her in arranging private security for January 6 and the days that followed. “These were some of the same people who had protected my family when the threat we faced was from al-Qaeda terrorists,” Cheney remarked. “Now they were protecting me again.”

This individual likely was an associate of Kimberly Cheatle, who served on Cheney's family detail for roughly six years. On Jan 6, Cheatle was the assistant director for the Secret Service’s Office of Protective Operations, the office responsible for protecting dignitaries which included incoming Vice President Kamala Harris that day. Harris’ Secret Service detail failed to detect the alleged pipe bomb during security sweeps at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, allowing her to come within 20 feet of the explosive. The agency also failed to report her evacuation from the DNC as an “unusual protective event,” as required by its policies.

For reasons still unknown, Harris has avoided discussing her near-assassination by the MAGA bomber and consistently misrepresented her whereabouts that day.

Cheatle’s name was later included on the list of Secret Service personnel whose phones were subpoenaed over deleted messages from that day. She resigned her position as director of the Secret Service in July 2024—Joe Biden appointed her in 2022 to lead the agency —following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

Missing Secret Service Text Messages

On January 16, 2021, congressional committees sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) and other federal agencies including the FBI, instructing them to preserve January 6 related records. The letter’s appendix specifically named Joseph Maher, who briefly led I&A in the months leading up to and on January 6, and tasked him with circulating the directive throughout DHS.

Cheney ended up hiring Maher as her senior counsel for the J6 committee. In the summer of 2022, the committee learned that Secret Service text messages from January 5 and 6 belonging to at least two dozen Secret Service officials had been deleted.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi explained that the mobile devices were reset to factory settings on January 27, 2021, as part of a “pre-planned, three-month system migration.” He also told CNN that an extensive eight-hour search of various internal messaging systems yielded no record of the January 16 directive ever reaching their office.

The J6 committee condemned the missing Secret Service text messages, specifically citing the January 16 letter to preserve all records, but committee members conveniently omitted the fact that Maher, by then a member of their team, was the individual responsible for ensuring the directive was communicated to higher-ups at DHS.

Cheney Wasn’t Alone in her Pipe Bomb Hunch

There are other Cheney-related coincidences involving Maher. In 2003, Cheney’s husband appointed Maher as DHS’s principal deputy general counsel, a position he held until March 2024. His tenure overlapped with his brief oversight of the DHS I&A office from August 3, 2020, to January 20, 2021, and his subsequent role on the January 6 committee from August 2021 to January 2023.

An aide to Maher testified that I&A’s role for Jan 6 involved "increas[ing] its footprint" within the D.C. fusion center, which serves as the district’s intelligence hub for sharing information between government agencies. It was at the DC fusion center during a tabletop exercise on December 30, 2020—one week before the event—that more premonitions of a bomb threat disrupting the joint session edged closer to reality.

Donell Harvin, the center’s director at the time, told The Washington Post that the exercise simulated two explosive devices placed near the Capitol to "draw law enforcement out and cut their numbers in half," serving as a "diversionary tactic" for the crowd to attack the Capitol. "This was predicted by this analyst a week before it actually happened," he said.

An I&A intelligence officer stationed at the fusion center actively participated in several of Harvin’s planning meetings for January 6, specifically around December 30 and 31, 2020. "Our DHS I&A officer was invited, and either he or one of his colleagues attended most of those meetings," Harvin told the January 6 committee. He noted that this officer "was in the meetings with us," adding, "we pretty much couldn't get rid of him."

Despite this close collaboration and such accurate predictions, I&A failed to disseminate its intelligence more broadly ahead of January 6, limiting the sharing of threat information to its “local partners in the Washington, D.C. area.” Additionally, this information was only emailed to “select partners” and was not as widely disseminated. When DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari contacted local and federal law enforcement agencies to determine whether they had received information from I&A prior to January 6, all but the D.C. fusion center reported they had not. The D.C. fusion center did not respond to Cuffari’s inquiry.

Cheney’s Criminal Committee?

As vice chair of the January 6 committee—a position usually held by a member of the majority party—Cheney exerted a “remarkable level” of control over much of the committee’s work.

The House Administration subcommittee’s report surrounding her role in this capacity highlights several key issues: Cheney’s colluding with the committee’s “star witness” Cassidy Hutchinson without the knowledge of Hutchinson’s attorney; using the committee as a tool to attack President Trump at the cost of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars; and mishandling evidence produced by the committee including the deletion of over a terabyte of records—a volume equivalent to 6.5 million document pages such as PDFs or office files, 500 hours of high-definition video, or 250,000 photos.

Building on these revelations, further scrutiny is warranted regarding Cheney’s personnel decisions, particularly her hiring of Maher, an individual with long ties to the Trump-hating Cheney family.

Another report from the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee, reviewing the handling of the pipe bomb investigation, is expected soon.