Will Mike Pence cooperate?

Mike Pence and his former aides can almost certainly help resolve some of the darkest questions about what Donald Trump and his co-conspirators really envisioned happening on Jan. 6. Which is why it’s surprising that Axios is now reporting that the former vice president and his advisers are being cooperative with the House select committee examining the insurrection.

Among the advisers who have testified are former chief of staff Marc Short and former press secretary Alyssa Farah. According to Axios, Short reportedly would not have done this without Pence’s direct approval.

As Axios reports, Pence’s advisers “have been particularly cooperative” as the committee focuses on what Trump “was doing during the more than three hours the Capitol was under attack.”

That may seem like a no-brainer: Of course Pence and his advisers can shed light on that time period. But if they do, it might help pick the lock on a bunch of other unresolved—and under-appreciated—unknowns about Jan. 6 and the lead-up to it.

Let’s note the obvious: This may be a leak designed to make Pence and his advisers appear more cooperative than they’re actually being. But it’s worth pointing out that such a leak would put them in the crosshairs of Trump and right-wing media, not to mention others refusing cooperation with the committee, such as former Trump advisers Mark Meadows and Stephen Bannon, who are being hailed on the right for their heroic resistance.

Be that as it may, what makes this truly interesting is what the committee really wants to know from Pence and his confidantes.

First, let’s recall an under-appreciated but important fact: As the violence raged, Pence adamantly refused entreaties by his security detail to be removed from the Capitol.

The committee plainly wants to know what Pence feared might happen if he did leave the premises. Note that back in August, the committee requested from the National Archives all documents and communications regarding Pence’s “movements and protection” on that day, an apparent effort to shed light on that question (among other things).

It is likely Pence feared that if he were removed, Trump and his co-conspirators might somehow manage to secure a delay in the count of electors. That would have been central to executing the scheme that had apparently been put in motion. Securing a delay was pivotal to getting a few states to revisit their vote tallies and, hopefully, send new presidential electors.

Second, there has been a great deal of confusion around just how Pence responded to the long pressure campaign on him to abuse his official role on Jan. 6 to refuse to count Joe Biden’s electors. This, too, was meant to secure that delay.

Let’s underscore that achieving this delay was at the heart of the procedural coup attempt. Recall that a Senate report released in October detailed that a Trump co-conspirator at the Justice Department tried to get an official department letter sent to multiple states won by Biden, pressuring them to hold special sessions to consider appointing alternate electors.

That fizzled, and the pressure on Pence to secure that delay continued.

On Jan. 6, Pence announced that he would not go along with the scheme. A big question is whether, this having been established, Trump and his allies came to see the violence as an instrumental way of securing the delay that Pence had refused to execute.

Hearing from Pence and his advisers on this point would be highly illuminating, to say the least.

It’s clear that the committee wants to establish just how seriously Pence and his advisers considered this scheme. If Pence had carried it out, it’s not clear what would have happened, but we probably would have lurched into a sustained constitutional crisis.

What all these unknowns have in common is this: Filling them in will shed a lot more light on just how close we came to a much worse meltdown than even the one we did live through. There may be no one who can illuminate that with more clarity than Pence and his advisers.