Pressure campaign on Pence focus of third hearing on Jan. 6 insurrection
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign urging Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally overturn the 2020 presidential election was the focus of a hearing Thursday by the House committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021, which presented evidence making the case that Trump put Pence’s life in danger during the Capitol insurrection.
The committee laid out a last-ditch plan pushed by Trump and California attorney John Eastman to persuade Pence to reject the votes of certain states or send results to state legislatures to determine whether fraud occurred.
“This is constitutional mischief,” retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told the committee.
Rep. Pete Aguilar, DCalif., led the hearing with the help of committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-wyo. The trio outlined a multiweek effort by Trump that included private meetings, tweets aimed at pressuring Pence to accept Eastman’s theory that Pence could either reject electoral votes outright or could suspend the proceedings and declare a 10-day recess in which state legislatures would be ordered to reexamine election results.
The panel heard testimony from Greg Jacob, who as Pence’s chief counsel was present for multiple meetings in which Eastman and Trump pushed the vice president to intervene. Jacob said that Pence never wavered from his initial reaction to the idea in early December.
“The vice president never budged,” Jacob said. “It just made no sense from everything that he knew and had studied about our Constitution that one person would have that kind of authority.”
The committee also highlighted video of depositions from Pence chief of staff Marc Short, who was also in the Eastman meetings, and from White House staff who told the committee about which members of Congress were involved in Trump’s efforts.
The panel showed testimony from White House officials and several lawyers who said that Eastman’s theory was wrong and that they told Trump and others many times before Jan. 6. And the committee highlighted a private acknowledgment by Eastman and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that they knew the plan was illegal, though they had asserted publicly it was legal.
Jacob said that Eastman acknowledged in an Oval Office meeting with Trump and Pence that the plan would violate the Electoral Count Act of 1887, but Eastman said that he considered the statute unconstitutional and didn’t expect the courts would take up its legality. In a meeting the next day, Jacob said that Eastman acknowledged the Supreme Court would rule against them 9-0.
Other deposition footage will show how the plan evolved over several weeks to become more “politically palatable,” Aguilar said.
Eastman, a former professor at Chapman University in Orange County, California, argued in memos and in meetings with state and federal lawmakers that Pence had the authority to reject states’ Electoral College votes due to allegations of fraud — an act that would have left deciding the next president up to state delegations in the House — or send results back to the states to have their legislatures examine the results and decide whether they should be changed.
By law, the vice president’s role when Congress certifies the Electoral College results is largely ceremonial. Luttig explained to the committee the legal reasoning he gave Pence to counter the pressure he was under from Trump and Eastman and the constitutional crisis that would have occurred if an elected official had acted to overturn the will of millions of voters.
Luttig said America narrowly missed the first constitutional crisis since the nation’s founding.
“I believe that if Vice President Pence had obeyed the orders from his president and the president of the United States of America during the joint session of the Congress of the United States on Jan, 6, 2021, and declared Donald Trump the next president of the United States — notwithstanding that thenPresident Trump had lost the electoral college vote, as well as the popular vote in the 2020 presidential election — that declaration of Donald Trump as the next president would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America,” Luttig said.
The latter portion of the hearing is expected to focus on the danger Pence was in during the insurrection, with evidence including a tweet sent by Trump an hour and a half after the violence began and 11 minutes after Pence was evacuated from the Senate floor as rioters approached.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” Trump tweeted.
Aguilar said the committee overlaid the route along which Pence was evacuated with a second-by-second timeline of where the rioters were in the building.
“How many paces they were apart is very small,” Aguilar said.
The committee will also show a clip of testimony from a rioter cooperating with the Justice Department who said that if those storming the Capitol “would have found (Pence), they probably would have killed him,” Aguilar said.