The third session of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill began Thursday with testimony focused on President Trump’s pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to nullify the election.
Testifying was Vice President Mike Pence’s former attorney, Greg Jacob, and retired Republican Judge J. Michael Luttig, who at the time advised against following Trump’s demands to call the election fraud.
Both insisted that Pence had no legal authority to delay the election, that he was told so, and that he was never really willing to consider it.
On the day of the riots, Luttig sent a tweet, at the behest of the Pence team, explaining that the vice president did not have the authority to nullify the election. Pence then cited Luttig’s advice as the reason he didn’t take any of the steps Trump was urging.
Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, said today’s hearing would show Mike Pence’s “serious efforts to explain that he could not unlawfully refuse to count electoral votes.” Pence understood, Cheney said, that his oath of office was more important than his loyalty to President Trump.
Luttig’s testimony sharply challenged former Trump adviser John Eastman, a California lawyer who argued that Pence had the constitutional power to nullify the election. There is “little, if any, substantive constitutional authority,” said Luttig, who said, “nothing in the Constitution or laws of the United States,” nor anything in historical precedent, suggested that Pence had such power, and if Had the outgoing vice president attempted such a thing, the consequences would have been dire.
“I believe that if Vice President Pence had obeyed the orders of his President on January 6, 2021 and declared Donald Trump the next President of the United States, even though Donald Trump had lost the election… that declaration would have plunged the United States United in what I believe would have been equivalent to a revolution within a constitutional crisis that, in my opinion, would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”
John Charles Eastman, a lawyer and former campaign adviser to Trump and his election team, emerged today as a key architect of the plan to pressure Pence to overturn the election.
Witnesses said Eastman knew his proposals would be defeated in court, but he kept promoting them anyway.
A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Eastman clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Clarance Thomas and former Circuit Court Judge John Michael Luttig.
He specialized in civil and constitutional litigation at a Nebraska firm, served as Dean of Chapman University School of Law, and later became a Trump supporter. He wrote a pamphlet saying that Kamala Harris was not born in the United States and therefore could not be vice president.
He quickly became a member of Trump’s inner circle. Pence’s attorney, Gregory Jacob, described him as a “snake” in the president’s ear.
