J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, said that if Mike Pence went with Donald Trump’s orders to reject the electoral vote count for Joe Biden it “would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America.” Luttig, a conservative judge and informal adviser to Pence, said that it “would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.”
Greg Jacob, who was Pence’s counsel, said that the vice president’s “first instinct” was that he did not have the authority to do what Trump wanted him to do. He said that they studied constitutional text, the Electoral Count Act and historical precedent that confirmed the vice president’s view. Jacob said that Pence concluded that there was no way that the Constitution’s framers would have given the vice president the authority to essentially decide who the next president should be.
“The history was absolutely decisive,” Jacob said.
The committee has been focusing on the role of John Eastman, an attorney who wrote up a memo that laid out how Pence could reject the electors on the grounds that in seven states, there were dueling “slates of electors” for Trump in seven states. But Cheney argued that Eastman was aware when he wrote the memo that such an argument was false, as he had written an email in December, 2020, that such a slate of electors, not certified by the states, would be “dead on arrival” in Congress.
Jacob said that in discussions with Eastman, he pointed to Vice President Al Gore, who presided over the electoral vote count after losing the 2020 presidential election following a showdown that went to the Supreme Court. Jacob said he told Eastman, Don’t you think Al Gore might have liked to have known” in 2000 that “he had the authority to just declare himself president of the United States?”
PREVIOUSLY: The January 6th Commission, once again getting the spotlight from broadcast and cable networks for its latest hearing, focused its attention on the pressure that President Donald Trump placed on Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electoral vote count in favor of Joe Biden on January 6.
“Donald Trump wanted mike pence to do something no Vice President has ever done,” said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), at the outset of the hearing.
“Mike Pence said no — he resisted the pressure., he knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong,” Thompson said, adding that the president then “turned the mob on him,” a mob that was captured on video outside the Capitol chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence.’” The committee played video of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse before the Capitol attack, in which he called on Pence to block the electoral results, followed by clips of angry Trump supporters threatening the vice president. The video segment ended up with picture of a makeshift noose set up on Capitol grounds.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said that “what the president wanted the vice president to do was not just wrong; it was illegal and unconstitutional.”
The featured witnesses were to include Greg Jacob, Pence’s former counsel, and J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals and informal adviser to the then-vice president.
Cheney has suggested that laws were broken as Trump, with the advice of attorney John Eastman, urged Pence to reject the electors, something that the vice president ultimately determined that he did not have the authority to do.
In the days leading up to this latest hearing, its vice chair, Cheney previewed its focus, dropping a clip on Twitter in which a White House attorney warned Eastman, in the aftermath of January 6, “Get a great f-ing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.”
New revelations about January 6 have emerged even outside the committee’s official proceedings.
As the Capitol was attacked, Pence was whisked away to his Senate office. ABC News’ Jon Karl released photos of Pence, as his wife, Karen, shut the curtains in the office, apparently concerned that they could be spotted by the mob below.
On Thursday, Axios reported that the committee would seek to interview Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, after reports that she contacted Eastman. Ginni Thomas had also contacted then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the election, as she embraced election fraud conspiracy theories.