Pence aide warned Secret Service day before Jan. 6
Trump was to turn publicly on VP, book research reveals
The day before a mob of former President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff called Pence’s lead Secret Service agent to his West Wing office.
The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a message for the agent, Tim Giebels: The president was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Pence because of it.
The warning — the only time Short flagged a security concern during his tenure as Pence’s top aide — was uncovered recently during research by this reporter for an upcoming book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” to be published in October.
Short did not know what form such a security risk might take, according to people familiar with the events. But after days of intensifying pressure from Trump on Pence to take the extraordinary step of intervening in the certification of the Electoral College count to forestall Trump’s defeat, Short seemed to have good reason for concern. The vice president’s refusal to go along was exploding into an open and bitter breach between the two men at a time when the president was stoking the fury of his supporters who were streaming into Washington.
It is unclear what, if anything, Giebels did with the warning.
A day after Short’s warning, more than 2,000 people — some chanting “Hang Mike Pence” — stormed the Capitol as the vice president was overseeing the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Outside, Trump supporters had erected a mock gallows. After Pence was hustled to safety, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, is reported to have told colleagues that Trump said that perhaps Pence should have been hanged.
A Secret Service spokesperson did not respond to an email seeking comment. A spokesperson for Pence declined to comment.
A few weeks after Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020, aides to Pence learned that some in Trump’s loose network of advisers were discussing the possibility of Jan. 6, 2021 — set under statute as the day of the Electoral College certification — as a potentially critical date in Trump’s efforts to stay in power. Soon, Pence asked his general counsel, Greg Jacob, to write a memo explaining what his powers were during certification.
The memo did not take a clear position, but Pence’s advisers concluded that the vice president had no authority to dictate the outcome. But Pence and his team were faced with regular pressure from a cast of Trump supporters arguing he did have such power.
At the end of December, Pence traveled to Vail, Colorado, for a family vacation. While there, his aides received a request for him to meet with Sidney Powell, a lawyer who promoted far-fetched conspiracy theories about flaws in voting machines, and whom Trump wanted to bring into the White House, ostensibly to investigate his false claims of widespread voter fraud.
The meeting request was relayed through Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican Party, according to a person familiar with the exchange. Ward had joined a suit filed by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, that asked a court to say that Pence could decide whether to accept or reject slates of electors from states during the Electoral College certification.
The suit was asserting what Pence’s aides argued he did not have the power to do. Some Pence advisers were suspicious that Powell wanted to serve the vice president with legal papers related to the case.
Short objected to Ward’s support of the suit. She relayed to him that they would not pursue it if Trump was uneasy with it.
(The proposed meeting with Powell never happened.) Powell and a spokesperson for Ward did not respond to emails seeking comment.
There were other points of friction that left the Pence team on high alert. Meadows told Short that the president was withholding approval of a pot of transition funding for Pence to establish a post-White House office.
Trump tweeted on the morning of Jan. 5 that Pence could reject electors. He had tried to persuade some of his informal advisers outside the White House to go to the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s official residence, to seek an audience to pressure Pence. That day, Trump spoke with Pence again, pressing him to do what the vice president said he could not.
On Jan. 5, at about 1 p.m., Pence released a memo making clear that he disagreed with the president about his power to intervene in the certification. The memo was not shared with the White House counsel in advance; the trust between the offices was shattered by then.