Tag: Capitol attack

In March 2021, less than three months after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Donald Trump was asked about the matter of his supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the building. Obviously, this presented an opportunity for the ex-president to disavow the violence of that day in general as well as the threats of violence that had been directed at his VP in particular. But rather than take that opportunity, the former guy defended the people who had literally called for the vice president to be hanged, claiming, incredibly, that it was “common sense” for them to threaten Pence’s life over his failure to overturn the election results. And on Monday, we learned that he wasn’t just fine with said threats; he was allegedly cheering them on from afar. 

Opening her interview with Cassidy Hutchinson last night, Rachel Maddow read an excerpt from the former White House aide’s new book, in which Hutchinson recounts a hugely disturbing moment on January 6: 

The TV in the Oval dining room is blaring. The president is yelling. What’s he saying? I can’t make it out. I hear him say “hang” repeatedly. Hang? Hang? What’s that about? Mark [Meadows] hands his phone back to me, the cue for me to return to my desk. Back in my office, my phone notifies me of a Trump tweet: “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!” 

I’m struggling to process what’s happening as Mark, Pat Cipollone, Pat Philbin, and Eric Herschmann stumble back to the office. I overhear their conversation, and suddenly everything makes sense. They are calling for the vice president to be hanged. The president is okay with it. He doesn’t want to do anything. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong. He thinks Mike is a traitor. This is crazy. We need to be doing something more. 

During her testimony before the January 6 committee in June 2022, Hutchinson told the panel, “I remember Pat [Cipollone, the White House counsel] saying something to the effect of, ‘Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be fucking hung.’ And Mark had responded something to the effect of, ‘You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.’ To which Pat said something like, ‘This is fucking crazy. We need to be doing something more.’”

But this appears to be the first time we’ve heard that Trump was chanting about hanging Pence while at his perch in the White House. (A year after the attack, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who also served as chief of staff to the first lady, told CNN that as Trump “gleefully” watched the insurrection unfold on TV, he happily remarked on “all of the people fighting for me” and hit rewind to watch it again.)

In the week since former president Donald Trump was hit with his third criminal indictment, which charges him in connection with his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his lawyers haven’t been shy about broadcasting his legal strategy. Apparently, Trump’s defense hinges on cooperation from former Vice President Mike Pence. In a Sunday interview with ABC’s The Week, Trump lawyer John Lauro made the bizarre claim that Pence, whom Capitol rioters vowed to hang on January 6, will “be one of our best witnesses” when Trump goes to trial.

Lauro, who was brought onto the former president’s defense team last month, added that he’d read Pence’s recent memoir, So Help Me God, “very carefully,” and if Pence “testifies consistent with his book, then President Trump will be acquitted.”

“I cannot wait until I have the opportunity to cross-examine Mr. Pence, because what he will do is completely eliminate any doubt that Mr. Trump—President Trump—firmly believed that the election irregularities had led to inappropriate results,” Lauro said.

The question of whether Trump truly believed the election was stolen is likely to become a major theme of the trial. Responding to Lauro’s claims, former U.S. Attorney Gene Rossi told Newsweek Sunday that Pence would likely be a devastating witness for Trump on that subject. “The conversations that Pence had with Trump show a guilty mind. When the president says, ‘You are too honest,’ that is code for ‘I know I am asking you to do something illegal,’” he said.

The conversation Rossi was referring to, which is contained in special counsel Jack Smith’s 45-page indictment, was a January 1, 2021 phone call in which Pence allegedly told Trump he felt he did not have constitutional authority to reject or return electoral votes to the states on January 6. In response, according to the document, Trump said, “You’re too honest.”

For his part, the former vice president responded to Trump’s latest indictment by tweeting that “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” On Wednesday, Pence further criticized the former president for surrounding himself after the 2020 election with “crackpot lawyers” who said only what his “itching ears” wanted to hear.

Lauro’s ABC appearance was just one of multiple interviews he gave Sunday in which he seemed to outline the former president’s legal strategy. In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Lauro admitted that Trump may have committed a “technical violation of the Constitution,” but argued that his actions were not a violation of criminal law. Later on the show, Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the January 6 Committee, called Lauro’s comments “deranged.”

“First of all, a technical violation of the Constitution is a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution in six different places opposes insurrection,” he said, adding that Trump “conspired to defraud the American people out of our right to an honest election by substituting the real legal process we have under federal and state law with counterfeit electors.”

And still, Trump’s defense insisted: in a third Sunday interview, this one with CNN’s Dana Bash, Lauro outlined how Trump’s free speech defense is likely to unfold. Attempting to draw a distinction between “asking” and “directing,” Lauro argued that Trump pressuring Pence to block the election certification was done in an “aspirational” way.

“What President Trump did not do is direct Vice President Pence to do anything,” Lauro argued. “He asked him in an aspirational way. Asking is covered by the First Amendment.” Later in the interview, Lauro argued that the “transition of power” from Trump to President Joe Biden “was certainly peaceful.”

“Did you see what happened on January 6?” an awestruck Bash responded.

Mike Pence did a good thing on January 6, 2021, when he refused to bow to Donald Trump’s demands to block the certification of the 2020 election. Unfortunately for the country, that’s where the then vice president’s good deeds started and ended. For one thing, in the run-up to that day, Pence tried his damnedest to figure out a way to help Trump steal a second term. For another, in the years since, the ex-VP has shamelessly done everything in his power to ensure his former boss escapes any actual responsibility for inciting a violent insurrection, from stonewalling the January 6 committee to defying a subpoena from the special counsel investigating Trump. Meanwhile, Pence still can’t even bring himself to say he won’t vote for the guy who inspired the, “hang Mike Pence” chants on January 6, and who just this month declared that that insurrection? Was all Pence’s fault. 

As you might imagine, all of this has been pretty frustrating for a lot of people—not least of all the federal judge who said Tuesday that Pence’s attempts to dodge the subpoena to appear before the grand jury probing Trump are crap, and that he must show up.

CNN and other outlets report that US District Court judge James Boasberg “has decided that…Pence must testify to a grand jury about conversations he had with Donald Trump leading up to January 6, 2021,” according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. (The ruling is currently under seal.) As CNN notes, the ruling represents a “major win” for Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Merrick Garland last year to oversee both the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and his handling of classified documents. Among other dubious legal arguments, Pence had claimed that his chats with Trump are protected by executive privilege, which prevents him from providing testimony about them. Last month, J. Michael Luttig—a former federal appeals court judge, conservative, and the person whose counsel Pence listened to concerning certifying the 2020 results—said in an op-ed that that was, legally speaking, horseshit, writing: “We can expect the federal courts to make short shrift of this ‘Hail Mary’ claim, and Mr. Pence doesn’t have a chance in the world of winning his case in any federal court and avoiding testifying before the grand jury…. The only question now is not whether he will have to testify before the grand jury, but how soon.”

Pence still has the opportunity to appeal the decision and presumably will. In other less-than-great news, Boasberg ruled, per CNN, that the former VP “can still decline to answer questions related to his actions on January 6 itself, when he was serving as president of the Senate for the certification of the 2020 presidential election,” according to a source.

Still, requiring Trump’s ex-number two to testify about the conversations they had leading up to the attack on the Capitol is clearly a big deal, given that the 45th president spent weeks trying to convince Pence to block Joe Biden’s win:

Trump’s conversations with Pence in the days surrounding the insurrection have been of keen interest to investigators probing the attack. Though Pence declined to testify before the House January 6 committee that investigated the insurrection, people in Trump’s orbit told the committee about a heated phone call he had with Pence the day of the attack in which he lobbed insults at his vice president…. Nicholas Luna, a former special assistant to Trump, told the committee he remembered Trump calling Pence a “wimp.” Luna said he recalled something to the effect of Trump saying, “I made the wrong decision four or five years ago.” And Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s former chief of staff, said she recalled Ivanka Trump telling her that “her dad had just had an upsetting conversation with the vice president.”

For Pence’s part, many of his public comments about his conversations with Trump in the days before and after the insurrection have come in a memoir he published last year. In the book, Pence wrote that Trump told him in the days before the attack that he would inspire the hatred of hundreds of thousands of people because he was “too honest” to attempt to overturn the results of the election. The former vice president also said in the book that he asked his general counsel for a briefing on the procedures of the Electoral Count Act after Trump in a December 5 phone call “mentioned challenging the election results in the House of Representatives for the first time.”

In related news, last month, The New York Times reported that both Ivanka and Jared Kushner had been subpoenaed to testify before Smith’s grand jury. While it’s not clear if the former first daughter and son-in-law will put up a similar fight as the ex-VP, it is clear that Ivanka’s testimony would be of particular interest, given that she reportedly attended the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the attack in the reported hopes of keeping “her father from going too far.”

In the immediate wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, a narrative emerged that Mike Pence was a national hero for refusing to do Donald Trump’s bidding and block the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. Of course, as we later learned, a more precise description of the then VP would have been “guy who did the bare minimum and actually tried very hard to find a way to prevent Biden from becoming president out of slavish loyalty to Trump.” Thanks to reporting in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, Peril, we know that Pence, in his own words, told Trump that he did “everything” he could to try and stop the certification of the 2020 election, and pleaded with former vice president Dan Quayle to help him figure out if there was any way to do so, telling Quayle: “You don’t know the position I’m in.” And two years after the fact? Pence is still doing Trump’s bidding.

On Thursday, CBS News reported that Special Counsel Jack Smith asked a federal judge to force Pence to comply with a grand jury subpoena to testify regarding Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and the insurrection that followed. If you were still laboring under the impression that Pence did the right thing on January 6 from the get-go, you might think he’d have no problem complying with the request. But of course, he did not do the right thing, and has indicated he’ll fight the subpoena, just like he did when the January 6 committee attempted to get him to testify. Only this time, the former vice president has made the absurd argument that, because he was acting in his capacity as the president of the Senate while presiding over the vote count, he was essentially a legislator and is therefore not required to testify thanks to constitutional protections afforded to the legislative branch.

“On the day of January 6, I was acting as president of the Senate, presiding over a joint session described in the Constitution itself. So, I believe that that Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution actually prohibits the executive branch from compelling me to appear in a court, as the Constitution says, or in any other place,” Pence told reporters last week. “We’ll stand on that principle and we’ll take that case as far as it needs to go, if it needs be to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Unfortunately for the former VP—who was very much not a member of Congress on January 6—not everyone is buying that argument. Jack Smith, for one, but also the guy who told him there was no legal basis for him to block Biden’s win that day. In an op-ed published on Friday, J. Michael Luttig—a former federal appeals court judge who has both the distinction of being a longtime conservative and the person whose counsel Pence listened to concerning certifying the 2020 results—wrote:

If Mr. Pence’s lawyers or advisers have told him that it will take the federal courts months and months or longer to decide his claim and that he will never have to testify before the grand jury, they are mistaken. We can expect the federal courts to make short shrift of this “Hail Mary” claim, and Mr. Pence doesn’t have a chance in the world of winning his case in any federal court and avoiding testifying before the grand jury.

And also:

Whatever the courts may or may not find the scope of any protection to be, they will unquestionably hold that Mr. Pence is nonetheless required to testify in response to Mr. Smith’s subpoena.

And our favorite part:

Mr. Pence’s lawyers would be well advised to have Jack Smith’s phone number on speed dial and call him before he calls them. The special counsel will be waiting, though not nearly as long as Mr. Pence’s lawyers may be thinking. No prosecutor, least of all Mr. Smith, will abide this political gambit for long.… The only question now is not whether he will have to testify before the grand jury, but how soon. The special counsel is in the driver’s seat, and the timing of Mr. Pence’s appearance before the grand jury is largely in his hands. Mr. Smith will bide his time for only so long.

Maybe something for the former VP to consider.