Politics- The
January 6 committee's third public hearing painted a picture of American democracy on the brink. - Two former legal advisers to VP Mike Pence testified in detail about the pressure campaign targeting him.
American democracy was on the brink like no time ever before.
So said the witnesses and lawmakers serving on the House Select Committee probing the January 6 insurrection during its third public hearing on Thursday, which is examining the unprecedented pressure campaign targeting then-Vice President Mike Pence leading up to January 6.
The two witnesses testifying during the marathon afternoon session were Greg Jacob, Pence's former chief counsel, and retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, both of whom advised Pence as he rebutted President Donald Trump and conservative attorney
Jacob and Luttig, steeped in legal expertise and constitutional scholarship, explained at a granular and methodical level why neither the Electoral Count Act nor the 12th Amendment permitted Pence to unilaterally reject Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden, as Trump and Eastman were pushing the vice president to do in a break with all of US history.
The hearing also painted a picture of just how close the United States came to a full-blown coup. The witnesses outlined a gulf-sized rift between Trump and his vice president, and how Pence ended up caught in the balance, carrying the weight of history and the integrity of the US Constitution on his shoulders.
This all happened as rioters stormed the Capitol and came within 40 feet of the vice president's location — at one point.
"Our nation owes you a great debt for your knowledge, integrity, and your loyalty to our Constitution," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select panel, in his closing statement. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, praised the witnesses and Pence, who was not present, for doing the right thing "at a critical time."
A venerated former conservative federal judge speaks up and issues a warning.
Luttig, a widely respected conservative legal figure, served for over a decade on the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals and was twice considered for the Supreme Court during the George W. Bush administration. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz once said Luttig is "like a father to him," Insider's Bryan Metzger reported.
Luttig's words on Twitter influenced the two-page memo Pence put out on the morning of January 6, in which he said he would not seek to meddle with the election. And he spoke out in person at the hearing.
"That declaration of Donald Trump as the next president would have lunged America into what I think would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America," Luttig said at the beginning of the hearing.
Later, Luttig said: "I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice president overturn the 2020 election" based on a faulty reading of history.
In his closing remarks, Luttig issued a stark warning that American democracy may not be so lucky in the next presidential race, when Trump or his successor could "succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020" in overturning an election.
"That's what the former president and his allies are telling us," Luttig added. "The former president and his allies are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public."
Indeed, in a January 30, 2022, statement, Trump asserted that Pence had had the authority to unilaterally throw out state elector votes certified by dual houses of Congress, saying: "Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!"
John Eastman apparently didn't believe his own theories of how Pence could overturn the election.
In his January 3, 2021 memo to Pence's team, Eastman argued that the Electoral Count Act was unconstitutional and Pence should disregard it and give himself the authority to reject Electoral College slates under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution.
But Eastman was singing a different tune just a few months before.
Rep. Pete Aguilar presented a draft letter to Trump dated to October 2020 that included a suggestion that the vice president, serving as president of the Senate, could unilaterally reject election results. It was unclear who wrote the initial memo.
"I don't agree with this," Eastman wrote in the document in a comment dated October 11, 2020. "Nowhere does it suggest that the President of the Senate gets to make that determination on his own."
—Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) June 16, 2022
"Judge Luttig, does it surprise you that the author of those comments in blue was, in fact, John Eastman?" Aguilar asked.
"Yes it does, congressman," Luttig said.
Eastman requested a preemptive pardon.
After playing a key role in the pressure campaign targeting Pence, Eastman emailed Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on January 7, the day after the insurrection, to ask for a presidential pardon.
"Third, I've decided I should be on the pardon list, if that's still in the works," Eastman wrote in an email obtained by the committee.
—The Recount (@therecount) June 16, 2022
Late in the evening of January 6, after rioters had been cleared from the Capitol where the VP, his family and his aides had sheltered for hours, Eastman emailed Pence's counsel to break the law and disrupt the electoral certification he was overseeing.
According to the email released by the committee, Eastman wrote, "So now that the precedent has been set that the Electoral Count Act is not quite so sacrosanct as was previously claimed, I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation."