WASHINGTON — The pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally overturn the 2020 presidential election and the danger he was in during the riot itself will be the focus of Thursday’s hearing on the House investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The committee will lay out the last-ditch plan pushed by lawyer John Eastman and former President Donald Trump to persuade Pence to reject the votes of certain states or send results to state legislatures to determine whether fraud occurred.
“When every lawsuit was lost, they started to gravitate to this effort that specifically put the vice president literally in the crosshairs. And so we’re going to talk about the theory that led to that pressure, but also the pressure campaign that (Pence) was under specifically, the last 72 hours leading up to January 6,” Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., told the Los Angeles Times before the hearing.
Aguilar will lead the hearing with the help of committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.
The panel will hear testimony from Greg Jacob, who as Pence’s chief counsel was present for multiple meetings as Eastman and Trump pushed the vice president to intervene. The committee is also expected to highlight video of depositions from Pence Chief of Staff Marc Short, who was also in the Eastman meetings, and from White House staff who told the committee about which members of Congress were involved in Trump’s efforts. Other deposition footage will show how the plan evolved over several weeks to become more “politically palatable,” Aguilar said.
Eastman, a former professor at Chapman University in Orange County, California, argued in memos and in meetings with state and federal lawmakers that Pence had the authority to reject states’ electoral college votes due to allegations of fraud — an act that would have left deciding the next president up to state delegations in the House — or send results back to the states to have their legislatures examine the results and decide whether they should be changed.
By law, the vice president’s role when Congress certifies the Electoral College results is largely ceremonial. Retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig is expected to explain to the committee the legal reasoning he gave Pence to counter the pressure he was under from Trump and Eastman and the constitutional crisis that would have occurred if an elected official had acted to overturn the will of millions of voters.
The latter portion of the hearing is expected to focus on the danger Pence was in during the insurrection, with evidence including a tweet sent by Trump an hour and a half after the violence began and 11 minutes after Pence was evacuated from the Senate floor as rioters approached.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” Trump tweeted.
Aguilar said the committee overlaid the route along which Pence was evacuated with a second-by-second timeline of where the rioters were in the building.
“How many paces they were apart is very small,” Aguilar said.
The committee will also show a clip of testimony from a rioter cooperating with the Justice Department who said that if those storming the Capitol “would have found (Pence), they probably would have killed him,” Aguilar said.
