The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol on Thursday said Donald Trump’s “dangerous” last-gasp attempt to pressure his vice-president, Mike Pence, to reject the electoral count, brought the country “dangerously close to catastrophe”.
With live witnesses and recorded deposition, the panel aimed show how an increasingly desperate Trump became fixated on a “completely nonsensical and antidemocratic” theory – devised by conservative law professor John Eastman – that Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, could reject the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. The vice-president has no such power.
Congressman Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee and a Democrat of Mississippi, began the session by quoting from the former vice president who said earlier this year that there is “almost no idea more un-American” that one man could choose the president, as Trump was asking him to do.
“Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice-president has ever done,” Thompson said, adding: “We were fortunate for Mr Pence’s courage. On January 6, Oor democracy came dangerously close the catastrophe.”
The panel argued that Trump’s embrace of this scheme – and his public and private pressure campaign on Pence – put the vice-president’s life in danger in the hours-long siege of Congress. It will also seek to show that there is an “ongoing threat” to democracy from people advocating the false view that the 2020 election was rigged.
During the course of the two-hour hearing on Thursday, the committee turned to two witnesses to show that Pence’s unflinching loyalty to Trump had a limit – a final ask from a president refusing to accept his defeat in an election that recounts, elections officials and courts had determined was free and fair.
Squeezed between a president who refused to accept defeat and a constitution that provided him no such power to change the course of the election, the vice-president chose the constitution, those who advised him testified on Thursday.
