WASHINGTON (AP) — The 1/6 committee on Thursday plunged into Donald Trump’s last-ditch efforts to salvage the 2020 election by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to defy historical precedent and reject the electoral count in the run-up to the U.S. Capitol riot.
With two witnesses Thursday, including Pence’s counsel, the House panel is making a case that Trump’s false claims of a fraudulent election left him grasping for alternatives as courts turned back dozens of lawsuits challenging the vote.
Trump latched onto conservative law professor John Eastman’s obscure plan and launched a public and private pressure campaign on Pence days before the vice president was to preside over the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress to certify Joe Biden’s election victory. A federal judge has said it is “more likely than not” Trump committed crimes in his attempt to stop the certification.
Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson opened the hearing citing Pence’s own words that there is “almost no idea more un-American” than the one he was being asked to do — reject the vote.”
“Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice president has ever done,” Thompson said. “Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe.”
By refusing Trump’s demands, Pence “did his duty,” said the panel’s vice-chair Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
The committee was portraying gripping, if complicated, final days before the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection as the defeated Trump mounted his effort to upend longstanding election procedures, putting his own vice president in danger as the mob headed toward the Capitol.
The panel is hearing from Greg Jacob, the vice president’s counsel who fended off Eastman’s ideas for Pence to carry out the plan; and retired federal judge Michael Luttig, who called the plan from Eastman, his former law clerk, “incorrect at every turn.”
Jacob said that Pence summoned him to his West Wing office in early December 2020 to seek clarity about the vice president’s role in the certification of election results. He said it became clear to Pence that the founding fathers did not intend to empower any one person, including someone running for office, to affect the election result.
Pence never wavered from that initial view, Jacob said.
Luttig said that had Pence obeyed Trump’s orders, obviously contrary to the law, the declaring “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.”
The panel aims to show that Trump’s pressure on Pence directly contributed to the attack on the Capitol.
“The illegality of the plan was obvious,” the committee said in a court filing against Eastman.
With graphic video, viewers saw what happened as rioters outside the Capitol were chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and spewing vulgarities while storming the building. Thursday’s session was expected to divulge new evidence about the danger Pence faced with a makeshift gallows on the Capitol grounds as the vice president fled with senators into hiding. Nine people died in the insurrection and its aftermath.
Thompson said Thursday the panel will ask Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for an interview amid disclosures of the conservative activist’s communications with people in Trump’s orbit ahead of the attack. He did not specify a schedule for that.
“It’s time for her to come talk,” Thompson told reporters ahead of the hearing.