Jan 6 panel gives chilling details of Mike Pence’s escape from mob
WASHINGTON: The mob invading the Capitol got within 40 feet of then vice-president Mike Pence as his security team rushed him away on January 6, 2021, and an informant later told the FBI that extremists leading the assault would have killed him given the chance.
Those were among the harrowing new details a House committee investigating the insurrection on Thursday added to accounts of Pence’s ordeal during the riot. The panel rendered a portrait of Donald Trump callously indifferent to the danger his vice-president faced throughout the day.
The panel also heard testimony that top White House lawyers believed Trump’s plan to use Pence to block congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election wasn’t legal. Even John Eastman, the author of the strategy, admitted beforehand that the Supreme Court would rule against it “nine-to-nothing,” Pence chief counsel Greg Jacob told the committee.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows already had told Trump that rioters had breached the Capitol before the president sent out a tweet declaring Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” during a congressional session to count electoral votes, panel member Representative Pete Aguilar said. Rioting surged after the tweet, he added.
“It felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that,” Sarah Matthews, a Trump deputy press secretary who was at the White House during the riot, said in a video excerpt from a deposition the committee aired.
The crowd rampaging through the Capitol chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and erected mock gallows outside the building. Aguilar said a confidential informant told the FBI afterwards that members of the Proud Boys, an extremist group whose members were among the first to break into the building, would have killed Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had they reached either of them.
Pence’s Secret Service detail whisked him and his family down back stairways and through hallways to a secure location on the Capitol complex, passing within 40 feet (12.2 metres) of the crowd, Aguilar said. The vice-president was determined not to leave the Capitol until the election certification was completed and refused instructions from Secret Service agents to shelter inside an armoured car, just to be certain they wouldn’t remove him, Jacob said.
Trump never called to check on Pence’s safety while the vice president was under siege in the Capitol, Jacob said. Pence and his wife Karen reacted “with frustration” to that, he added.
Relations between between the president and vice-president had grown so tense over Pence’s refusal to overturn the election results that Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, told the panel he decided to warn the head of the vice-president’s Secret Service detail the day before the January 6 congressional session.
“My concern was for the vice president’s security,” Short said in a video excerpt from a deposition he gave the committee. Short said he felt that as the disagreement became more public he believed “that the president would lash out in some way”.
Aides and family who gathered in the Oval Office with Trump on the morning of January 6 described a furious final phone call the president made to Pence to implore him to go along with the plan.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone considered the plan “nutty,” Trump adviser Jason Miller said in video testimony. Senior adviser Eric Herschmann called it “completely crazy.”