By COLLEEN LONG, Related Press
President Joe Biden is bestowing the second highest civilian medal on Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson — the lawmakers who led the congressional investigation into the violent Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot by Donald Trump’s supporters, and who Trump has mentioned needs to be jailed.
Biden will award the Presidential Residents Medal to twenty folks in a ceremony Thursday on the White Home, together with Individuals who fought for marriage equality, a pioneer in treating wounded troopers, and two of the president’s longtime associates, former Sens. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn.
“President Biden believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others,” the White Home mentioned in an announcement. “The country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice.”
President Joe Biden makes an announcement on the newest developments in New Orleans from Camp David, Md., Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Picture/Susan Walsh)
Biden final yr honored individuals who have been concerned in defending the Capitol from the rioters, or who helped safeguard the need of American voters in the course of the 2020 presidential election, when Trump tried and didn’t overturn the outcomes.
Cheney, who was a Republican consultant from Wyoming, and Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, led the Home committee that probed the riot. Cheney later mentioned she would vote for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris within the 2024 presidential race even campaigned together with her, elevating Trump’s ire. Biden has been contemplating whether or not to supply preemptive pardons to Cheney and others Trump has focused.
Trump, who gained the 2024 election and can take workplace Jan. 20, nonetheless refuses to again away from his lies concerning the 2020 presidential race and has mentioned he would pardon the rioters as soon as he takes workplace.
Throughout an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump mentioned, “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 with out proof they “deleted and destroyed” testimony they collected.
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” he mentioned.
Biden can be giving the award to lawyer Mary Bonauto, who fought to legalize same-sex marriage, and Evan Wolfson, a pacesetter of the wedding equality motion.
Different honorees embrace Frank Butler, who set new requirements for utilizing tourniquets on struggle accidents; Diane Carlson Evans, an Military nurse in the course of the Vietnam Struggle who based the Vietnam Ladies’s Memorial Basis; and Eleanor Smeal, an activist who led ladies’s rights protests within the Nineteen Seventies and fought for equal pay.
He’s additionally giving the award to photographer Bobby Sager, lecturers Thomas Vallely and Paula Wallace, and Frances Visco, the president of the Nationwide Breast Most cancers Coalition.
Different former lawmakers being honored embrace former Sen. Invoice Bradley, D-N.J.; former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, the primary girl to signify Kansas; and former Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., who championed gun security measures after her son and husband have been shot to dying.
Biden will honor 4 folks posthumously: Joseph Galloway, a former struggle correspondent who wrote concerning the first main battle in Vietnam within the e book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young”; civil rights advocate and lawyer Louis Lorenzo Redding; former Delaware state choose Collins Seitz; and Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi, who was held with different Japanese Individuals throughout World Struggle II and challenged the detention.
The Presidential Residents Medal, created by President Richard Nixon in 1969, is the nation’s second highest civilian honor after the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It’s awarded to those that “performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.”
Initially Revealed: January 2, 2025 at 4:03 AM PST
