- A former federal judge says helping former VP Pence was "the highest honor" of his life.
- J.
Michael Luttig spoke out to help Pence rebuff pressure to overturn the election.
A retired conservative federal judge said speaking out the day before
Judge J. Michael 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 before retiring from the federal judiciary in 2006.
Luttig detailed in an interview with Politico the play-by-play of advising the vice president ahead of January 6, 2021.
In the days leading up to the election certification, Trump-allied figures including the legal scholar John Eastman (a former Luttig clerk) pressured Pence to disregard federal law to unilaterally toss out slates of Electoral College votes to overturn then-President-elect Joe Biden's election win.
Pence's office wanted to mount its own response, which is where Luttig came in. Luttig said Richard Cullen, the outside counsel to the vice president, called him early on the morning of January 5, 2021, and said he needed "urgent" help from Luttig.
"We need to do something publicly. Get your voice out to the country," Luttig said Cullen told him.
"At that point, I said, 'Oh, my gosh, Richard, I don't even have a job, much less an official one. I have no platform from which to speak.' I'm out here in Colorado at 6 in the morning. I don't even have a fax machine,'" Luttig told Politico.
But Luttig did have a Twitter account. Luttig asked his son, who works in tech, to help him to tweet some legal analysis. His son, Luttig said, initially told him he didn't have time to help him — until Luttig told his son he'd cut him out of his will if he didn't help him figure out how to tweet a thread.
"The only thing I knew how to do was type out in prose all I wanted to say. Well, that was like 10 tweets," Luttig said. "So I go down to my office, and I open up the instructions on my laptop, and I copy and paste what I've written on my iPhone into my laptop into a Word document.
"And then, I set about to divide it up into 180-character tweets. I read it and reread it multiple times and then, I take a deep breath and I hit 'tweet.'"
Luttig's Twitter thread began with: "The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast."
He added: "The Constitution does not empower the Vice President to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise."
Luttig's Twitter missives immediately gained attention from the political press. But he told Politico he didn't find out anything more had come out of his Twitter thread until the morning of January 6.
Two of Luttig's former law clerks emailed to tell him that Pence had cited those tweets in his open letter explaining why he wouldn't attempt to overturn the 2020 election results at the joint session of Congress, which Pence released as he headed to the Capitol to preside over the joint session.
"That's the first time that I ever knew what was to happen with the tweet from the day before," Luttig said. "No one had ever told me that. I had no idea. And they, obviously, didn't want and didn't intend to tell me — and that's fine. It's none of my business. I was floored to read that and honored."
Luttig said the next day, January 7, he was at a UPS store in Vail, Colorado, waiting to drop off packages when he got what appeared to be a spam call. "I never answer spam calls, but I had nothing else to do," he said.
The voice on the other end asked if he was Judge Luttig — and told him to hold for the vice president.
Luttig said Pence got on the line and was "the most gracious person in the world" on the call.
"I scurried out to the car so I'd have some privacy," he said. "The vice president got on: 'Judge, this is Mike Pence.' And I said to the vice president that it was the highest honor of my life that he had asked me and I will be grateful to him for the remainder of my life."