Watch: Third Jan. 6 committee hearing
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House committee investigating the Capitol insurrection used its latest public hearing on Thursday to focus on the pressure that then-President Donald Trump put on his vice president, Mike Pence, to delay or reject the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory on Jan. 6, 2021. The committee is trying to show how that pressure incited a violent mob to lay siege to the Capitol that day.
Pence, presiding over the certification in the vice president’s traditional ceremonial role, did not give in. He declared Biden the next president early the next morning, after the congressional session resumed and the rioters were cleared.
Lawmakers on the nine-member panel, and the witnesses who testified at the hearing, described Pence’s decision as having averted a constitutional crisis.
Takeaways from the committee’s third public hearing this month:
A VICE PRESIDENT UNDER PRESSURE
Greg Jacob, a counsel to Pence who fended off pressure to carry out the plan, said in live testimony at the hearing that the vice president first summoned him to his West Wing office in early December 2020 to seek clarity about his role in the certification of the election results.
Jacob said it was clear to the vice president that the founding fathers did not intend to empower any one person to affect the election results.
“And our review of text, history — and frankly, just common sense — all confirm the vice president’s first instinct on that point, there is no justifiable basis to conclude that the vice president has that kind of authority,” Jacob said.
But in the coming weeks, the committee laid out, Pence would come under pressure from Trump to invalidate Biden’s win and find a way to keep the president in power. While many White House aides made clear that they didn’t agree with the scheme, a conservative law professor named John Eastman increasingly had the ear of Trump. He wrote multiple memos suggesting Pence could reject electors or simply declare Trump the winner.
... AND IN DANGER
In video testimony, Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, said that the vice president told Trump “many times” that Pence did not agree with the idea. But Trump kept up the pressure anyway.
On the morning of Jan. 6, as Pence issued a public statement making clear that he would certify the legitimate results of the election, Trump told thousands of his supporters in front of the White House that he hoped Pence would reconsider. The committee showed video from that rally in which Trump said that if Pence doesn’t come through, “I won’t like him as much.”
Trump’s continued pressure, the committee asserts, put Pence in immediate danger after rioters marched down to the Capitol and chanted for his death.
In one video played by the committee, a Trump supporter said he had heard reports that Pence had “caved,” and if he did they were going to drag “politicians through the streets.” As Pence evacuated the Senate and hid in the Capitol, rioters in front of the building chanted “bring him out!” A fake guillotine was constructed on the National Mall, and people breaking into the building chanted “ Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! ”
Trump continued to pressure Pence even as his supporters stormed the building, tweeting that Pence “lacked courage.”
“Donald Trump turned the mob on him,” said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the panel.
A CLOSE CALL IN THE CAPITOL
As the rioters broke in, Pence hastily evacuated his post presiding over the Senate. California Rep. Pete Aguilar, a Democrat on the committee who led Thursday’s hearing, told Jacob that the group was at one point only 40 feet from the rioters.
Jacob, who was with Pence at the time, said they had “heard the din” of the violent mob as they evacuated but that he didn’t know they were that close.
The committee also showed never-before-seen photos of Pence after he had evacuated to a secure location in the Capitol, including one photo in which he was reading one of Trump’s tweets.
Jacob said that Secret Service agents wanted them to leave the building but Pence refused to get in the car.
“The vice president didn’t want to take any chance” that the world would see him leaving the Capitol, Jacob said.
A ‘HEATED’ PHONE CALL AND A PRESIDENT’S THREATS
The committee shed some new light on a phone call between Trump and Pence the morning of Jan 6. In videotaped testimony, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, said the conversation was “pretty heated” and had “a different tone than I had heard him take with the vice president before.”
In other taped interviews, aides described snippets of the conversation. Trump’s personal aide, Nicholas Luna, said he heard the word “wimp.” Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, Julie Radford, said she was told the president called Pence “the p-word.”
Jacob said he was there when Pence returned from taking Trump’s call. The vice president was “steely, determined, grim,” Jacob said.
In the following hours, Trump went to the rally stage and criticized the vice president to his thousands of supporters. Aguilar said the committee found that Trump had revised the speech to include criticism of Pence.
AN ILLEGAL SCHEME
Aguilar called Eastman’s scheme, which was amplified by lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others, “a legally and morally bankrupt idea.”
After writing memos challenging the nation’s election laws in December, and convening state electors on a call, Jacob said that Eastman laid out his theory at a Jan. 4 meeting with Trump, Pence and a small group of aides.
Eastman said Pence, as the presiding officer, could reject the votes outright. Alternately, he could “suspend the proceedings and declare essentially a 10-day recess” during which the results would be sent back to certain state legislatures. Eastman said he preferred the second option, Jacob said.
The next morning, on Jan. 5, Eastman had changed his mind, Jacob said. He walked into a meeting and said, “I’m here to request that you reject the electors.”
Pence never wavered, Jacob said.
Retired federal judge Michael Luttig, who had spoken to Pence’s staff ahead of the insurrection, also testified at the hearing. He said that if Pence had declared Trump president, it would have “plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis.”
DISTRUST OF EASTMAN
As Eastman gained the president’s favor, several White House aides grew increasingly concerned about the possible ramifications of what he was proposing. But Trump did not listen to their advice.
The committee played videotaped testimony from Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, expressing incredulity at Eastman’s legal theory that a vice president could overturn an election. “Are you out of your effing mind?” Herschmann said he told the professor, adding that he should get a good lawyer.
Trump campaign aide Jason Miller said colleagues had told him they thought Eastman “was crazy.”
Eastman was subpoenaed by the committee, but he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights during his closed-door interview with the panel last year. He has also sued to block the panel from obtaining many of his communications from the time.
TURNING TO THEIR FAITH
Pence is a deeply religious man, and Jacob’s testimony recounted the vice president’s faith — and his own — as the events unfolded.
In one discussion, Jacob said, Pence told him: “I can’t wait to go to heaven and meet the framers, and tell them the work that you did in putting together our Constitution is a work of genius.”
Pence and his aides started Jan. 6 at the vice president’s house, saying a prayer together. And as they hunkered in the undisclosed location later in the day, Jacob said he pulled out a Bible, reading a verse about a second in command who defied an order he could not follow. He said he “took great comfort” in the passage.
Short said in his videotaped interview that he texted Pence a Bible verse at the end of the day.
“I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I’ve kept the faith,” the passage read.
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Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.
You can watch the first two public hearings below:
Jan. 6 hearings: What we’ve learned, and what’s next
By MARY CLARE JALONICK
WASHINGTON (AP) — House investigators are trying to make a methodical case that President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election led directly to his supporters’ insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The House panel investigating the attack has held the first two in a series of hearings providing its initial findings after a yearlong probe and more than 1,000 interviews. The committee has shown clips not only from the violent attack on the Capitol, but also from its own closed-door interviews with Trump aides and associates who were trying to dissuade him from spreading falsehoods about an election he lost.
A rundown of what we’ve learned so far from the public hearings of the select Jan. 6 committee — and what’s next:
REBUFFED ON ELECTION NIGHT
One after one, video excerpts have been played of Trump’s aides describing their conversations with the just-defeated president as returns came in on election night and in the days afterward, as it became increasingly obvious that he had lost to Democrat Joe Biden. The committee is trying to establish that Trump pushed lies about widespread election fraud despite hearing clear evidence that it didn’t happen.
As the aides tried to be realistic with the president, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani took the opposite approach, telling him on election night that he should declare victory right away, according to the testimony. It was four more days until Biden was declared the winner.
Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, said she knew it was clear that the results would not be final on election night. Campaign aide Jason Miller said a better sense of the numbers was needed before making any declarations. Campaign manager Bill Stepien said he advised Trump to tell reporters that the race was too early to call, that he was proud of the campaign he ran and that he was in a good position to win.
But Trump didn’t listen. Miller said that Trump told the room that anyone who didn’t agree with Giuliani was being “weak.” He went out and publicly declared the election “a fraud on the American public.”
“Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said.
FRAUD INVESTIGATIONS COME UP EMPTY
In the weeks after the election, the Department of Justice investigated Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. States and localities that had counted the votes did their own checks. None found evidence to support the claims that Trump and Giuliani were pushing.
Attorney General Bill Barr, who resigned from office after publicly declaring there was no evidence of widespread fraud, described his interactions with the president as he tried to convince him of the facts. Not only was Trump angry, but he was becoming “detached from reality,” Barr said in a videotaped deposition.
Barr said that when he would tell Trump “how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
Two in-person witnesses at the committee’s hearing on Monday talked about Trump and Giuliani’s pressure to try and overturn the results in their states. BJay Pak, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta who resigned as Trump pressured Georgia officials, said his office investigated Giuliani’s “reckless” claims about fraud in the state and found them to be “simply untrue.”
Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, the only Republican on the city’s election board, said Trump’s claims about fraud in his city were “fantastical” and thorough investigations turned up nothing of the sort.
FUNDRAISING USING FALSE CLAIMS
The panel detailed Trump’s fundraising off his own falsehoods. He and his allies raised hundreds of millions after the election, the committee said, and broadly misled donors as to where some of the money was going. Some of the dollars that were advertised as going to an “election defense fund” actually benefitted groups and entities connected to Trump’s family and friends.
“Not only was there the Big Lie, there was the Big Ripoff,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., a member of the panel.
After the hearing Monday, Lofgren said on CNN that Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was paid $60,000 for a short speech at Trump’s rally ahead of the insurrection.
A REMINDER OF THE VIOLENCE
While some of the committee’s findings are new, some of the evidence they are presenting is not. But the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the panel want to remind the public of what happened that January day – not only how violent it was, but the lies that led up to it.
At the initial hearing on June 9, the panel showed new video of police officers being beaten as Trump’s supporters broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory. Images from body cameras and security video showed the huge and angry crowd as it surged toward the entrances and shattered windows and doors, repeating Trump’s claims about fraud.
Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards described a bloody “war scene” and hours of hand to hand combat. She was one of the first officers injured, thrown to ground as the first rioters pushed past bike racks. She suffered a head injury and still hasn’t yet returned to the same unit.
“It was carnage,” she said. “It was chaos.”
WHAT’S NEXT
While the schedule is fluid, the committee plans up to five additional hearings to lay out its findings. While the first two hearings showed the violence of the siege and documented Trump’s resistance as his aides and allies initially tried to present the facts of his November loss, future hearings will describe how he continued to push the lies and eventually set his sights on the congressional certification of Jan. 6.
On Thursday, the panel will describe Trump’s efforts to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to illegally delay the electoral count or to object to Biden’s win as he presided over the congressional certification. In a video posted to Twitter on Tuesday, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s Republican co-chair, said the panel will examine Trump’s “relentless effort on Jan. 6, and in the days beforehand, to pressure Vice President Pence to refuse to count lawful electoral votes.”
Rep. Cheney also included a preview clip: former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann telling the committee in a video interview that he had told John Eastman, a lawyer who was working with Trump to push the false fraud claims, that he needed to “get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.”
Other hearings will review Trump’s pressure on Justice Department officials and what was happening in the White House as the violence unfolded at the Capitol.
“The Trump campaign legal team knew there was no legitimate argument — fraud, irregularities or anything — to overturn the election,” Cheney said at Monday’s hearing. “And yet President Trump went ahead with his plans for Jan. 6 anyway.”
A CRIMINAL REFERRAL?
After the hearings, the committee says its investigation will continue. And panel members will ultimately have to make a decision about whether they have found criminal activity and, if so, whether they should refer it to the Justice Department. The department, which is conducting its own investigation, could take or leave the recommendation.
Committee members have been debating that issue, but have emphasized a referral is not their main goal.
“We’re making a report to the American people about what happened, why it happened and how we need to protect ourselves in the future,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat on the committee.
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Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.
