WASHINGTON (CN) — The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack added to its case Thursday against the country’s former commander in chief, making Donald Trump’s pressure on his vice president the focus of its latest public hearing.
Representative Bennie Thompson, a democrat who chairs the House select committee, opened proceedings this morning by praising former Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to overturn the 2020 election.
"He resisted the pressure. He knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong. We are fortunate for Mike Pence’s courage on Jan. 6. Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe,” Thompson said. "That courage put him in tremendous danger.”
Lawmakers used the hearing to walk through discussions underway at the Trump White House after it was clear that Trump had lost the November election to his Democratic opponent Joe Biden. In the lead-up to Jan. 6, John Eastman, a law professor working on Trump's 2020 campaign, was pushing a theory that the Constitution empowered Pence to reject the results of the Electoral College, but Pence and his own advisers were resistant.
The Jan. 6 Committee has portrayed Eastman as the architect of a plan to prevent Biden from being certified as president. In addition to lobbying state legislators to question the results of their states’ vote tallies, Eastman wrote a 2-page memo that said Pence should throw out the votes of certain states.
With Pence shirking Eastman's counsel, Trump himself lobbied his vice president to interrupt the congressional proceedings on Jan. 6, 2021, and prevent Biden from becoming president — rhetoric that the committee contends catalyzed hordes of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol.
The committee on Thursday shared excerpts of a video deposition with Marc Short, who was Pence’s chief of staff. Short said Pence was “very consistent” in telling Trump that the vice president did not have the constitutional authority to overturn the election results. Trump nevertheless continued to back Eastman’s convoluted legal theory.
Greg Jacob, one of the former vice president’s lawyers while he was in office, said he had his first conversation with Pence about the vice president’s role in certifying the election in early December 2020.
Jacob testified that Pence’s instinct during that conversation was that there was “no way” the framers of the Constitution would have put one person “in a role to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the election.”
Jacob testified that Pence “never budged” about his belief that the vice president did not have the authority to alter or reject the Electoral College results.
On Jan. 5, Eastman outright asked Pence to reject the Electoral College results, Jacob testified.
Despite Pence and his team’s opposition to Eastman’s theory, Trump released a statement on Jan. 5 saying his vice president agreed with him about the vice president’s authority to alter the election results.
Jacob said Trump’s statement was “categorically untrue” and “shocked” Pence’s team.
Michael Luttig, a retired Fourth Circuit judge who informally advised Pence, testified "there was no basis whatsoever" for Eastman's legal strategy.
“Had Vice President Pence obeyed the orders from his president and declared Donald Trump the next president of the United States, it would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America which, in my view, would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic,” Luttig said.
When Eastman shared his legal theory with then-White House counsel Eric Herschmann prior to Jan. 6, Herschmann testified in a video deposition that he was stunned.
“I said, ‘Are you out of your effing mind? You’re going to turn around and tell 78 million-plus people that you’re going to invalidate their votes because you think the election was stolen?’” Herschmann recalled, saying he warned Eastman there would be “riots in the streets” if the election was overturned.
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