Last Updated on January 3, 2025
Joe Biden will commemorate disgraced former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney and Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson, leading the congressional investigation of the January 6 2021 U.S. Capitol riot the Presidential Citizens Medal, the second-highest civilian medal in a ceremony Thursday at the White House.
Biden will also bestow the presidential medals to Americans who fought for LGBTQ+ marriage, two of his longtime friends, former Sens. Ted Kaufman, D. and Chris Dodd, D-Conn.
“President Biden believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others,” the White House said in a statement. “The country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice.”
Cheney, the daughter of late former Vice President Dick Cheney from Wyoming, and Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, disseminated propaganda claiming the Capitol riot was an “insurrection” akin to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and sedition conspired by Donald Trump and his supporters.
The Hollywood-produced J6 committee hearings aired live primetime for months in 2022 as January 6 suspects were surveiled and arrested by the FBI in predawn raids and handed decades in prison after protesting.
Cheney also announced she would vote for Kamala Harris and campaigned with Harris in the 2024 presidential race.
Trump’s senior adviser Jason Miller called the celebration of Cheney and Thompson “pathetic.”
“With attacks happening in the United States and around the world, THIS is how Biden is spending his time today?” Miller wrote on X, referencing the two terror attacks that occurred on New Year’s Day.
Pathetic. With attacks happening in the United States and around the world, THIS is how Biden is spending his time today?
“Biden honors Liz Cheney with Presidential Citizens Medal” https://t.co/bKrmN7KoUx
— Jason Miller (@JasonMiller) January 2, 2025
Trump has signaled Cheney will face repercussions for weaponizing the federal government against his supporters.
“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” Trump recently told Meet The Press, warning without evidence they “deleted and destroyed” testimony they collected during the J6 hearings.
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” the incoming commander-in-chief said.
Trump also told Meet the Press in his first interview since re-wining the election that he would pardon the January 6ers on the first day of his administration.
“I’m going to be acting very quickly,” he said. “First day, I’m looking first day. These people have been there — how long is it? Three, four years,” Trump said. “They’ve been in there for years. And they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”
As National File has reported, Biden loyalists employed in the federal government, particularly lawyers working for the Department of Justice are “looking for protection and the exit,” scurrying to find jobs in the private sector as the Trump administration prepares to take office January 20.
Biden is considering shielding Cheney and others who have weaponized the government against political dissent during his administration with preemptive pardons.
In December, Biden pardoned his son Hunter from any crimes against the U.S. that he “has committed or may have committed” from Jan. 1, 2014 to Dec. 1, 2024 and accused the Department of Justice of “unfairly” targeting his son ”
“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” he wrote.
He then commuted most federal death sentences, 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates, switching their penalty to life in prison without parole.
Biden will also be giving the presidential civilian awards to LGBTQ+ leaders, attorney Mary Bonauto, who fought to legalize same-sex marriage and Evan Wolfson, a leader of the marriage equality movement.
As the New York Post reports:
Other honorees include 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’s also giving the award to photographer Bobby Sager, academics Thomas Vallely and Paula Wallace, and Frances Visco, the president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.
Other former lawmakers being honored include former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-NJ; former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, the first woman to represent Kansas; and former Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-NY, who championed gun safety measures after her son and husband were shot to death.
Biden will honor 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 state judge Collins Seitz; and Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi, who was held with other Japanese Americans during World War II and challenged the detention.
