Biden gives civilian award to leaders of House Jan. 6 committee
President Biden on Thursday awarded the second highest civilian medal to Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson, leaders of the congressional investigation into the Capitol riot who Donald Trump has said should be jailed for their roles in the inquiry.
Biden gave the Presidential Citizens Medal to 20 people in a ceremony at the White House, including Americans who fought for marriage equality, a pioneer in treating wounded soldiers and two of the president’s longtime friends, former Sens. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) and Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).
“Together, you embody the central truth: We’re a great nation because we’re a good people,” Biden said. “Our democracy begins and ends with the duties of citizenship. That’s our work for the ages and it’s what all of you embody.”
Biden last year honored people who were involved in defending the Capitol from a mob of angry Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, or who helped safeguard the will of American voters during the 2020 presidential election, when Trump tried and failed to overturn the results.
Cheney, a Republican former Wyoming congresswoman, and Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, led the House committee that investigated the insurrection. The committee’s final report asserted that Trump criminally engaged in a “multipart conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the election he lost to Biden and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. Thompson wrote that Trump “lit that fire.”
Donald Trump suggests former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, might not be as willing to send troops to fight if she had guns pointed at her.
The crowd erupted in loud cheers and stood when Cheney took the stage. Biden clasped her hand and gave her the medal. The announcer said she was being given it “for putting the American people over party.”
Trump was impeached Jan. 13, 2021, by the House on a charge of inciting the insurrection. He was then acquitted in the Senate, with 57 senators voting to convict him, short of the two-thirds needed in the 100-member chamber. Thompson also got a standing ovation.
Cheney, who lost her seat in the GOP primary in August 2022, later said she would vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race and campaigned with the Democratic nominee, raising Trump’s ire. Biden has been considering whether to offer preemptive pardons to Cheney and others Trump has targeted.
Trump, who won the 2024 election and will take office Jan. 20, still refuses to back away from his lies about the 2020 presidential race and has said he would pardon the rioters once he is back in the White House.
During an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the president-elect said, “Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” claiming without evidence that they “deleted and destroyed” testimony they collected.
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” he said.
Cheney and Thompson were “an embarrassment to this country,” Trump communications director Steven Cheung asserted.
Biden also awarded the medal to attorney Mary Bonauto, who fought to legalize same-sex marriage, and Evan Wolfson, a leader of the marriage equality movement.
Other honorees included Frank Butler, who set new standards for using tourniquets on war injuries; Diane Carlson Evans, an Army nurse during the Vietnam War who founded the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation; and Eleanor Smeal, an activist who led women’s rights protests in the 1970s and fought for equal pay.
He also gave the award to photographer Bobby Sager; academics Thomas Vallely and Paula Wallace; and Frances Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.
Other former lawmakers honored included former Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.); former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, the first woman to represent Kansas; and former Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), who championed gun-safety measures after her son and husband were shot to death.
“Let’s remember, our work continues,” Biden said after presenting the awards. “We’ve got a lot more work to do to keep this going.”
Biden honored four people posthumously: Joseph Galloway, a former war correspondent who wrote about the first major battle in Vietnam in the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young”; civil rights advocate and attorney Louis Lorenzo Redding; former Delaware judge Collins Seitz; and Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi, who was held with other Japanese Americans during World War II and challenged the incarceration.
The Presidential Citizens Medal was created by President Nixon in 1969 and is the country’s second highest civilian honor after the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It recognizes people who “performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.”
Long writes for the Associated Press.
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