Donald Trump pressured his vice-president Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election despite having been told repeatedly that doing so would be illegal, a Congressional committee has heard.
Members of the bipartisan panel investigating the attack on the US Congress were told on Thursday that Pence made clear his opposition to the former president’s plan to block the certification of the election results, including in a heated telephone call on the morning of January 6.
Nevertheless, Trump continued to insist that Pence could and might refuse to certify the election, helping to incite the mob that stormed the US Capitol after Pence announced he would not do so.
Pete Aguilar, a Democratic member of the committee, said: “Despite the fact that the vice-president consistently told the president that he did not have and would not want the power to decide the outcome of the presidential election, Donald Trump continued to pressure the vice-president, both publicly and privately.”
The hearing, which was the third in a series of public sessions, focused almost entirely on the role of the vice-president before and during the January 6 attack.
Members showed how Pence refused to bow to pressure from Trump not to certify the results, even after he had to be evacuated from the Capitol building as a mob of the president’s supporters stormed it demanding his execution. Aguilar revealed that some of the rioters got within 40 feet of the vice-president as he was being evacuated.
Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chair of the committee, said: “We are fortunate for Mr Pence’s courage. On January 6, our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe. That courage put [Pence] in tremendous danger.”
In the weeks before January 6, Trump had been advised by a John Eastman, a constitutional scholar, that the vice-president had the power to simply reject the results during a Congressional session on that day.
Others around the former president vehemently disagreed. Eric Herschmann, one of Trump’s lawyers, called the idea “completely crazy”, arguing it would lead to riots on the streets.
Herschmann said he told Eastman at the time: “You’re going to turn around and tell 78-plus-million people in this country that your theory is this is how you’re going to invalidate their votes because you think election was stolen.”
“‘They’re not going to tolerate that,’ I said. ‘You’re going to cause riots in the streets,’” he added.
Witnesses said that several others in the former president’s legal team agreed, as well as his chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Greg Jacob, one of Pence’s former legal advisers, told the committee that even Eastman conceded in private conversations that the US Supreme Court would vote 9-0 against the theory if it were ever tested in court.
Members also saw evidence suggesting that in a draft letter to Trump written in October 2020, Eastman himself rebutted the theory, arguing: “Nowhere [in the constitution] does it suggest that the president of the Senate [the vice-president], gets to make the determination on his own.”
They also heard that Pence himself decided at an early stage such an attempt would be illegal. Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, said he had made his position clear that “he wouldn’t want that power bestowed upon any one person”.
Pence repeated his position during a call with Trump on the morning of January 6.
In response, said Nick Luna, Trump’s former personal assistant, Trump had called Pence a “wimp”. Julie Radford, the former chief of staff to Ivanka Trump, said the former president’s daughter had told her that her father used “the p-word” about his vice-president.
Even after that call, Trump continued to insist that Pence could overturn the election, and his frustration with his vice-president helped incite the mob which then stormed the Capitol building, members argued.
The committee played video of rioters screaming “Hang Mike Pence” after he announced he would certify the results.
Michael Luttig, a judge who also gave Pence legal advice at the time, argued that had the vice-president caved to Trump’s demands, it would have thrown the country into a constitutional crisis.
“The 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,” he said.
In a video preview of the hearing, Herschmann recalled telling Eastman the day after January 6: “Get a great effing criminal defence lawyer, you’re going to need it.”
The committee also revealed that Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers, a few days after the attack asking to be granted a presidential pardon.
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2022-06-16 20:23:35Z
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