inside the memoir are a ton of revelation, including this one, to perk up the ears of prosecutors and jack smith's office. cheney reveals mccarthy told her two days after the election he talked to trump and trump acknowledged he had lost the 2020 election. he needs to go through all the stages of grief, he said. cheney writes, she thought to herself those stages seemed to involve tweeting in all caps. we all know what happened after the election. donald trump fights desperately to overturn his election defeat. kevin mccarthy enabled him every step of the way. liz cheney says about the current speaker, cheney recounts how johnson pressured members to throw out election results from four states trump had lost. when i confirmed with him the flaws in his legal argument, he would say something to effect of, we just need to do this one last thing for trump. according to cheney, that effectively became the republican party ice agenda. here's what happened just before the capitol was attacked on the 6th. "cheneib a scene in the goploak room where members were encouraged to sign their names on electoral vote election sheets, lined up on the table for each state the rns were contesting. most members knew it was a farce and another display of fealty to donaldtrump. among them was mark green of tennessee. he moved down the line, signing his name to the pieces o paper, green said sheepishly to no one in particular, "the things we do for the orange jesus." in the aftermath of the insurrection, cheney's vote to impeach the ex-president and her refusal to back down from that vote cost her her position in republican leadershi her seat in congress. her conclusion now, "i am very sad to say that america can no longer count on aody of elected rnso protect our republic. every one ofus, republican, democrat, independent, must work and vote together tonse that donald trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated. this is the cause of our time." and that is where we start this hour with "washington post" congressional investigation reporter jackie aluma knicks. and charlie sykes. with me at the table for the hour, "new york times" editorial board member mara gay. first to the former member of the january 6th select committee adam schiff, also running for congress. what is your reaction to what cheney is saying about her former colleagues? >> it goes to a fundamental truth of the last six years, whiches that donald trump could not have done any of the damage that he inflicted, the tearing down of our institutions, the causing americans to distrust our election process, weakening the foundation of our system, and that is voting, but for the willing enablement of so many of her colleagues in congress. one of the terrible realizations of these years is how many enablers there were and how few people of courage and conviction there were also. and it gets to a fundamental truth that the historian robert carroll once described in an interview, when he said the power doesn't corrupt as much as it reveals. it doesn't always reveal the best, but it says a lot about who we are. it revealed liz cheney and adam kinzinger to be people of great power and conviction, but there were also literally 100 kevin mccarthys and alese stefaniks. this has put our democracy in peril. >> cheney describes a caucus often in fear of donald trump. i want to read a particularly telling bit from cnn's reporting about thebook. "she recounts gop colleagues, who she doe't name, told her he knew what trump had doneas impeachable, but he wasfrai that voting to imped t his wife and new babn danger. i abs understood his fear," she writes, "but i also thought perhaps you need to be in another job." congressman, you're no stranger to threats or intimidation, particularly because of the stance you have taken against the ex-president. do you share liz cheney's attitude on this, which is, if you can't stand the heat, get out the kitchen? >> absolutely. you know, you're right, this is a very dangerous trend we have seen of increasing acceptance and advocacy of political violence i think egged on by the former president. but if you're not willing to do your job, even when it involves getting threatened, then you better find another job right now, because there are things more important and standing up for our constitution and defending your responsibilities and, you know, living up to your oath of office is the most important. i remember speaking toed a adkinsing her, and he was saying that people keep saying liz and i are so courageous. it's not that we're so courageous, but we're surrounded by cowards. i think what we've come to learn is we knew inherently that courage can be contagious, but we also found during these years is so can cowardice. no one would speak out. there was this herd mentality, and there still is, people afraid of donald trump, unwilling to do the right thing when they know the right thing because they're either in fear of their personal safety or, more often, just the pedestrian concern over whether they get to keep their job. and, you know, for those members, i would just say there are more important things than keeping your job. being able to look at yourself in the mirror is one of them. >> let's pick up on that thread, because there is an anecdote that is reported by cnn out of cheney's memoir where she talks about the fact there was resistance on the part of some democrats adding their names to the 1/6 committee. nancy pelosi's staff and cheney's retelling hands her a list of all of the perhaps critical things that cheney had said about pelosi in the last year. pelosi said, so, why are you wasting my time? cheney said she has admiration for pelosi's leadership, she agrees with pelosi on the one thing that matters most. raskin has said much the same. they do agree on safeguarding democracy. is there a cross party coalition for democracy? what would it look like for a group of republicans and democrats to come together on this core issue? >> well, it would look, i think, a lot like the january 6th committee. i love that anecdote about nancy pelosi, because it's so classic nancy pelosi. it doesn't matter what liz may have said in the past. what matters and mattered to nancy pelosi is, is she the right person for this committee to do this work, and she clearly was. you know, but for adam and liz on that committee, none of these witnesses would have come forward. what made the hearing so power successful almost all were republicans that came forward because of liz and adam. with the leadership of bennie thompson, we worked together, notwithstanding, you know, deep ideological differences that each of us had with each other. i never thought i would be singing so many praises of a cheney before, but i came to deeply respect her, and i think that was very mutual in terms of all of us on the committee. so, i think there certainly is a cross-party nonpartisan coalition devoted to our constitution. you see a lot of republicans out of office, speaking in the same way that liz is, and i wish there were more people in elected positions of power willing to do that as well. >> congressman adam schiff, as always, thank you so much for spending time with us and getting us started. i want to bring in charlie and turn to you. talk about where we are today. there are multiple gag orders where trump's attorneys are saying he's not responsible for how his supporters interpret what he says, cheney says. a republican member of congress more than two years ago feared for his family if he voted to impeach. that congressman knew exactly how dangerous trump's rhetoric was. you can see the chilling effect that comes from the fear of knowing you could end up on the side of his wrath. >> there's nothing theoretical about all of this. we've gone through all of this. we've seen what's happened on january 6th. we've seen incidents of political violence around the country. we know what the temperature is. you know, this goes back to this notion that if you just humor donald trump that somehow everything will be okay. and yet after all these years, and i think this is what's so important about liz cheney coming out with this book now, she reminds us of the price of that kind of appeasement, that kind of self-rationalization, and what it can lead to. make no mistake about it, unless donald trump is held accountable, what happened on january 6th, 2021, is basically a rehearsal for what might be coming if, in fact, donald trump continues to tear everything down and ratchet up the kind of rhetoric that we're seeing on a daily basis now. >> liz cheney has said a lot about republican politics. this also reads as an eyewitness account of what happened before, during, and after january 6th. is liz cheney a potential witness for the prosecution? >> that's a really good question and one that i think i haven't even given much thought to since we know that there have been so many people who have cooperated with the committee and now jack smith's team in terms of -- as they've conducted their investigation and pressed criminal charges against the former president for his efforts to overturn the results of the election. that includes some of the people who were closest to him. at the end of the day, liz cheney was in the chamber and privy to interesting closed-door conversations that she's now extremely far from. but in those days following january 6th, she feels on a lot of these conference calls with kevin mccarthy. she was talking with mccarthy about, you know, his views of the president, the former president, and what he had done, how he bore responsibility for january 6th, all these thingss gone into further detail in her book. although i'm not necessarily sure she could add to the criminal case against trump, and there seems to be a lot of other people like his former white house counsel, people who were providing things to him on the outside, parent of these off-the-rails meetings we've all covered now repeatedly. they happened in the oval office ahead of the certification. people like john eastman, who i think lended themselves to providing more evidence that's more pertinent to the criminal case at hand. >> we've talked a lot about members of the house of representatives, but also words liz cheney has for members of the u.s. senate, specifically mitch mcconnell, who she accuses of flip-flopping on the trump impeachment. is is from cnn's reporting. "cheney writes mcconnell was firm in his view that trump i like where i am, he told her, according to the book, following news reports that he was contemplating voting to convict trump. mcconnell later changed course, apparently because h believed trump would jade away after 2020. leader mcconnell, who had made a career out of savvy political calculation and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, got this one wrong." the consequences of his having gotten that wrong. >> right. not just about him getting it wrong. i think the thing that's powerful about liz cheney's story and her book is the idea that she's not just taking us into, you know, what donald trump's head space may have been. she's taking into the kind of head space, if you will, of the entire republican party, an apparatus, and of the american institutions at the heart of congress, at the heart of democracy. she's kind of giving us a blow by blow of what went wrong, what went right, what could have gone even worse if a couple people hadn't stood up and did the right thing on january 6th. so i think it's really important because we do get fixated, understandably, on the former president himself, but the attempted coup on january 6th, and frankly in the weeks earlier, it wasn't just one person. it wasn't just the president. there were accomplices. and i think that she really gives us a sense of why that institution, meaning the republican party, you know, broke down and, you know, the failures of courage on many levels, and mitch mcconnell of course did come out after january 6th and had strong words in support of democracy. and then, you know, those flip-flops were extremely damaging to democracy as well, and i think that liz cheney is essentially kind of a rabbi in this story that can get very complicated. she's a truth teller. it reminds me of cassidy hutchinson, the former white house aide, who testified in the january 6th committee, because no one can tell a story more powerfully than republicans themselves who were there at the table in the room, and they have a certain credibility. also, this election next year is likely to be decided by voters in just a handful of states. so, you do wonder if there are republicans, moderate republicans out there, who read that book and may think, i just can't vote for trump again. i may not like joe biden, but -- you know, this book could make a difference. >> especially, charlie, as part of the republican theory of the case as cheney outlined, is this idea that eventually it would fade away, go away. it hasn't. in part because there have not been institutional republicans who have been willing to continuously beat the drum on this. i want you to listen to in message former president george w. bush sent after cheney voted to impeach trump. he wrote, "liz, courage is in short supply these ys. thank you for yours. you showed strong leadership, and i'm not surprised. lead on. 43." what does it say about the gop that the last republican president sent a message of support for his republican successor? >> that's extraordinary. it says a lot that, you know, the previous republican nominee for president, mitt romney, is saying that he's willing to vote for a democrat over donald trump. so, this is what liz cheney -- this is the significance of liz cheney, and maya is absolutely right. it's worth remembering, even though, you know, a lot of this is not new, that this is a cheney. this is liz cheney. this is somebody who was a deeply conservative republican who was in the leadership of the house of representatives. she is within that world. and so many of the voices that are coming out now are the people who are, you know, in the white house, who were part of trump's team, his former secretary of defense, his attorney general, his national security adviser. all of these people saying to the american people, look, remember what happened. this is what we saw. this is the danger that donald trump poses. maya is absolutely right. there is a real significance about the challenge that they are opposing to members of their own party. are you going to continue to look the other way? are you going to continue to enable this? because it's not just same old, same old. it's not just rewarding donald trump for what he's done, because donald trump is escalating. trump 2.0 is not the same as trump 1.0. trump is raising the stakes all the time. so, therefore, the moral challenge to republicans who see what's going on, who know what's going on, but have refused to speak ut, i think is becoming greater and greater all the time. so i think the fact that liz cheney, liz cheney, of all people, is going to be front and center once again is crucial at this particular moment. i think the republican party has already made the decision that it is, you know, trump all the way down, but they won't be able to do it without having her voice in their ear saying, okay, remember what you claimed to stand for, remember why you got into politics in the first place, and remember when you once thought that the country was more important than your own personal ambition. >> like a little jimmy cricket on their shoulder. let's talk about one of the most jaw-dropping anecdotes in the book, involving mccarthy's decision to visit trump at mar-a-lago three weeks after the january 6th attack. you will recall this photo of the two of them. cheney confronted mccarthy about the meeting. there it is. here's whappened. "mar-a-lago, wt the hell, kevin? they're reallyrried, mccarthy said. trp'not eating, so they asked me to come see him. you went to mar-a-lago because trump's not eating? yeah, he's really greszed, mccarthy said." if only kevin mccarthy was as worried about democracy, jackie, as he was about trump being too depressed to eat. >> yeah. kevin mccarthy has often found himself, as have other republicans in this place where we had to explain the discrepancy between his closed-door tough talk on the former president to his colleagues versus his actual real-life behavior and continued fealty towards trump that he demonstrated in real time while claiming otherwise. cheney obviously, you know, saw right through what mccarthy was claiming here, and i think we should note that at the end of the day not only was this moment a moment that not just liz cheney but others credited as the sort of singular act that brought trump back into the fold post january 6th, after mccarthy had previously been leading the charge against trump on these private conversations and in these private conference calls, saying that he singularly bore responsibility for encouraging his supporters to storm the capitol on january 6th. but then, posing for that picture with him, the both of them, was sort of the start of the rehabilitation tour that trump went on where he quickly became once again the de facto leader of the republican party. we should note that this loyalty to trump at all costs, as cheney outlines, there are these different reasons why people, you know, go against their morals and what they're privately feeling in order to back him and support him, whether it's the threat of violence or the desire to hang on to power, it does not pay off in the end. kevin mccarthy threw trump a lifeline, and when mccarthy needed it in return, when we needed the former president to call off matt gaetz and the other hard-line republicans from moving forward with their pledge to oust him as speaker, trump was nowhere to be found. he was fairly silent on social media, and this was a decision that matt gaetz later said that him and trump were aligned on in terms of removing mccarthy from power because he was -- had demonstrated some things that were insufficiently loyal to trump. >> if you have enjoyed this conversation about liz cheney's new book, we want you to know that liz cheney is going to join rachel maddow for her first primetime interview about her new book monday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern. and this is news. nicolle will be back here on tuesday for an extended interview with cheney live in studio, one day and one day only. she is back tuesday, december 5th, on "deadline: white house." she'll talk to liz cheney about her new book, "oath and honor." not to be missed. thank you to our guests. when we come back, the civil fraud trial continues. on the stand today was the contact between donald trump and all those loans deutsche bank vouched for. the key bank erp at the heart of his empire very connected to the trumps. we'll tell you what she had to say. and the truce between israel and hamas is due to end shortly. talks are continuing to end the pause in fighting as more hostages are released tonight, including one american. a live report from the region coming up. later in the show, another warning of america's tilt towards authoritarianism from someone who's seen much of it up close. one federal judge on what is to come if the big lie is allowed to persist. 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