A demonstrator holds a trapped mannequin with the words “Traitor” during a protest in front of the Washington Monument in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, January 6, 2021.
Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The House of Representatives’ election committee investigating the Capitol riot on Thursday (January 6th) highlighted former Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to support then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The committee’s third public hearing examined the intense pressure that Trump and his allies put on Pence to reject key electoral votes when he chaired a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, to confirm President Joe Biden’s victory. The hearing also focused heavily on John Eastman, a lawyer advising Trump, who pushed the dubious legal theory that Pence had virtually unilateral power to cancel the election.
Here are the main conclusions of the hearing:
Pence’s life was in danger
Pence approached about 40 feet from some of the Trump-backed rebels who stormed the U.S. Capitol building, said Pete Aguilar, D-California, who led much of the hearing Thursday.
“Don’t be fooled by the fact that the vice president’s life was in danger,” Aguilar said.
He noted that a confidential informant from the Proud Boys told the FBI that members of the far-right group “would have killed Mike Pence if given the chance”, according to a recent Justice Department case file.
Pence did not leave the Capitol on January 6, but was moved to safety during the riot.
Pence showed “courage” that day by opposing Trump, commission chairman Benny Thompson, D-Miss, said at the start of the hearing.
But that determination put the vice president in “great danger” when Trump “turned the mob against him,” Thompson said.
Trump was told Eastman that Pence could not cancel the election
Witnesses, both in person and in recorded testimony, testified that many officials told Trump and Eastman that Pence could not comply with the legal scheme to cancel the race in 2020. But Trump and Eastman still continued to put pressure on Pence and his team.
Former Pence chief of staff Mark Short said in a recorded interview with the commission that the vice president had told Trump “many times” before Jan. 6 that he had no legal authority to block election certification.
Former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said he had heard that former White House adviser Pat Chipolone “thought the idea was crazy and at one point faced Eastman with the same feeling.”
Other officials also think Eastman’s theory is “crazy” and will tell “anyone who wants to listen,” Miller said.
Moreover, former Pence lawyer Greg Jacob told the commission that Eastman had admitted one day before the Capitol riot that his legal theory would be rejected 9-0 if he went to the Supreme Court.
On the morning of January 6, Trump infuriated Pence in a tense phone conversation. He said the vice president was weak and “weak”, witnesses told the commission. Former Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, Julia Radford, said Trump’s daughter told her after the conversation that the president had called Pence the “word P”.
In a rally in front of the White House that began shortly before the mob violated the Capitol, Trump again pressured Pence to reject the election results. we will become president. “
Eastman demanded a pardon for the president after the uprising
Eastman told former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that he wanted to be added to the list of presidential pardons, the committee said.
“I have decided that I should be on the pardon list if this is still in progress,” Eastman wrote, according to a screenshot of an email shown during the committee’s third hearing.
The email was sent days after the Capitol riot, Aguilar said. This came after a January 7 conversation with White House attorney Eric Hershman, who said he told Eastman, “I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’ve ever received in your life: Get a great effective criminal defense attorney ; you will need it. “
Trump does not pardon Eastman. Interrogated by Capitol riot investigators, Eastman pleaded the fifth 100 times, Aguilar said.
Trump has pardoned many allies in his last days in power.
The investigation and the threat to democracy from the riots continue
The elected commission is scheduled to hold four more public hearings in June. During each of them, lawmakers intend to expose a different element of a coordinated plot to undermine the 2020 elections.
The panel is irritated by plans to show in future hearings how Trump tried to get the Justice Department to challenge the election results, how he forced officials in key states to cancel Biden’s victories, and how he led a violent mob to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Assistants to the committee emphasized that the hearings were only the initial findings of an almost annual investigation and that the investigation was ongoing.
This became particularly clear on Thursday as committee leaders Thompson and Liz Cheney’s representative, R-Wyo, confirmed that they wanted to talk to Ginny Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Ginny Thomas has been under intense scrutiny in recent months after announcing her efforts to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election.
Retired Federal Judge J. Michael Lutig warned during Thursday’s hearing that Trump remains a “clear and present threat” to US democracy, which was severely threatened on Jan. 6 and is now “at the cutting edge.”
The next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET.
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