January 6th Committee Opens Latest Hearing With Focus On How Donald Trump Pressured — And “Turned The Mob” — On Mike Pence
UPDATE: 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 information 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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