”He praised the rioters. He did not condemn them. That’s who Donald Trump is,” Liz Cheney said, while urging the crowd to “meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth. To reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump.”

In an interview Thursday night with Fox News Channel, Trump said of Harris and Cheney: ”I think they hurt each other. I think they’re so bad, both of them.”

Cheney lost her Wyoming seat to a Trump-endorsed candidate two years ago and endorsed Harris, the Democratic nominee, last month. The two women appeared together in Ripon, home to a white schoolhouse where a series of meetings held in 1854 to oppose slavery’s expansion led to the start of the Republican Party.

”I know that she loves our country, and I know she will be a president for all Americans,” Cheney said of Harris. Noting that she herself remains conservative, Cheney said she was ”honored to join her in this urgent cause.”

Harris is on a two-day Wisconsin and Michigan swing, while Trump was in Michigan on Thursday as both candidates grapple for wins in the ”blue wall” battleground states, which also include Pennsylvania.

While Cheney and Harris spoke, the former president took his social media site to say Democrats and prosecutors have lied about the “huge crowd of Patriots gathered in Washington, D.C. on January 6th.”

SUPERIOR, WIS. – Robert Thomas West, 44, was sentenced Thursday to more than seven years in a Wisconsin prison, plus four years of extended supervision, for his role in dismembering Ricky Balsimo Jr. and the lengths he went in covering up the murder of his longtime St. Paul friend.

West, of South Range, Wis., didn’t operate the power tools used to destroy Balsimo’s body, but he revived a longtime idea he had about what to do if he happened on a situation like this one: dispose of the body in weighted containers in the depths of Lake Superior.

West took the killer — his friend Jacob Colt Johnson — to a recreational vehicle in rural Wisconsin, gathered the tools, and manned a fire outside while Johnson cut the body to pieces. Then West burned the bloodied clothing and bleached the RV, drove weighted buckets up the North Shore to Grand Portage, and dropped them off the side of a commercial fishing boat into the lake. He dismantled the gun and tossed it in Middle Lake.

Johnson was sentenced last month to 40 years in Cook County District Court for Balsimo’s murder, and West was sentenced in August to 15 years in prison in Minnesota for his role in Balsimo’s death.

West was arrested after the murder on drug charges and offered law enforcement officials information about Balsimo, whose family had been looking for him in Duluth and Superior for about a month.

In outlining West’s role, Douglas County Judge George Glonek described the scene as “heinous” during the sentencing, the result of a plea agreement in which West didn’t stand trial in Wisconsin and testified against Johnson.

West participated in Thursday’s sentencing via phone from the state correctional facility in Faribault, after a miscommunication with staff that made Zoom impossible.

Balsimo’s parents Kim and Rick, and sister Raquel Turner, all dressed in shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with Ricky’s face, made the trip to Superior from St. Paul to offer victim impact statements — which they have done again and again as three defendants in the case have been sentenced, two in both Minnesota and Wisconsin courts.

Jurors in the federal racketeering conspiracy trial of three alleged Minneapolis Bloods gang members will begin deciding Friday whether street gangs can be treated as criminal enterprises akin to the mafia families of decades past.

An anonymous jury of 12 is expected to start deliberating Friday after receiving a lengthy set of instructions from Judge Susan Richard Nelson. They’ll decide a trial that started one month ago and was capped Thursday by closing arguments that dominated a full day of trial in St. Paul.

Desean James Solomon, 34, of Richfield, is charged with racketeering conspiracy, carrying and using a firearm in a crime of violence and aiding and abetting — all in connection to a series of crimes prosecutors said were to benefit the Minneapolis Bloods. Michael Allen Burrell, 44, of St. Paul, and Leontawan Holt, 26, of Minneapolis, have also been on trial on charges of aiding and abetting and carrying and using a firearm in a crime of violence.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Esther Mignanelli, in making the government’s final case to the jury, repeatedly punctuated descriptions of killings and drug trafficking with the coda of “they did this because they were Bloods.”

“What does it mean to be a Blood? It means to prove yourself through the crimes you commit,” she said.“It means peddling poisonous drugs throughout the city but especially your territory. It means carrying and sharing guns and when you have that gun you’re expected to use it. Because for Bloods, when one Blood moves they all move. When one Blood fights they all fight.”

Two homicides, one in June 2020 and another in April 2022, underpin the government’s RICO allegations, as well as open-air drug sales in the Bloods territory that includes George Floyd Square.

Defense attorneys on Thursday challenged the description of the Bloods as an organized criminal enterprise — instead painting it as cliques and neighborhood groups that engage in sporadic violence.