BLOGGER’S NOTE: Throughout this post, we will insert little cartoons of Trump (as seen above, but reduced in size) every time you are required, if you choose to believe in the fairy tale, to accept a ridiculously unbelievable statement, swallow an absurdity as fact, overlook an outright lie, refuse to consider evidence to the contrary or ignore common sense.
There is no fairy in Donald Trump’s fairy tale of the “Stolen Election.” You will find herein, however, that there was a plethora of toadies and sycophants, and (very likely) lawbreakers, all at work, trying to Donald a second term even he (if he could face reality) and they knew he didn’t deserve.
Third
Hearing:
The Last Stand of Vice President Pence
If all of that material presented in the first two hearings wasn’t enough (and it wasn’t if you believed in the fairy tale, and didn’t dare watch), the third hearing was equally bad.
Or, if you cared about
democracy, equally good.
__________
“This may be the most important thing I ever say.”
Vice President
Mike Pence
__________
These were all Trump
people, telling a story, and all testifying under oath. Marc Short, chief of
staff to Vice President Mike Pence, said he conveyed his doubts about the
stolen election “many times,” to the White House. He said that on January 4,
Dr. John Eastman (a central figure in Team Trump’s plot to overturn the
election results) admitted that the scheme he was helping hatch would be
illegal, if carried out. Vice President Pence was going to refuse to put aside
any electoral votes. As Mr. Pence and his legal team prepared a final
statement, he remarked, “This may be the most important thing I ever say.”
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Vice President Mike Pence. |
Greg Jacob, a lawyer on Pence’s staff, said Mr. Pence never wavered. Trump and Eastman were arguing that the U.S. Constitution gave a vice president the power, when counting the electoral votes, to set aside any he might want. “There was no way,” that the Founding Fathers, who “abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III, would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest,” Jacob said, “in a role to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election.”
Frankly, Jacob testified, it was “just common sense.”
Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, appointed by President George H. W. Bush to the bench, was a star witness, himself. Vice President Pence had sought out the highly-respected conservative jurist, for advice. Rep. Liz Cheney asked him to explain what he meant by a sentence in an op-ed he had written the day before: “Had the Vice President obeyed the President of the United States, America would have immediately been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing Constitutional crisis.”
Luttig spoke slowly and with great care, so that some of those who watched came away, wrongly, calling his testimony “boring.” It was not. The judge chose every word with care. He wanted to be precise. “The most foundational principle,” he said, the rule of law, “the profound truth,” “the simple foundational truth” of the Republic had been placed at grave risk.
Not by Democrats and not as a result of voter fraud. By the President of the United States in all the orange flesh.
The question before “the panel and the nation,” he warned was that Mr. Pence had been pressured to violate that truth on January 6. Had he done so, the nation would have been “plunged,” he said again, “into the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the nation” in 1789.
Even Dr. Eastman admitted, witnesses said, that Trump’s and his plan to have Mr. Pence ignore the electoral votes of several states Trump had lost, would be “dead on arrival in Congress,” if it was announced. Fake slates of electors did exist – and as part of the plot were to be trotted out. None of the seven fake slates had been certified by the legislatures of the seven states. And Judge Luttig, testified, there was no way, “frankly, ever,” that the Constitution granted a vice president power to count non-certified electoral votes. Luttig referred to what he described as the “sacred counting,” of the votes. He chose those words with precision – to make a point. There was, he said, “No basis…at all…none,” to support Dr. Eastman’s contention.
Pence in no way had the power to overturn the electoral count.
__________
“Are you out of your f-ing mind.”
__________
Jacob testified to the same point. In a meeting with Eastman, he stressed what should have been obvious. No vice president in American history had ever attempted such a ploy. Al Gore, if such power had existed, he told Eastman, could have declared victory for himself in 2001. (Vice President Biden could have tipped the much closer 2016 election Hillary’s way, as well.) Even Dr. Eastman “acknowledged that Al Gore did not and should not have that authority at that point in time.”
It wasn’t like the people in Trump’s ear didn’t know the castle they were building for the new king rested on quicksand. Marc Short testified that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows admitted “a couple of times,” that he knew Pence had no such authority to just toss electoral votes aside.
Jason Miller, who still works for Trump, and claimed publicly that the election had been stolen, whistled a different song behind closed doors. He knew, for example, that White House Chief Counsel Pat Cipollone believed the idea that Pence could ignore the votes “was nutty and at one point confronted Eastman, basically, with the same sentiment.” Short added that Cipollone expressed his admiration for Pence. Herschmann chimed in: “It made no sense” that the BP could choose the winner, as Trump – the loser – now said. Miller was under oath. So he had to speak truth. As far as Eastman’s arguments went, Cipollone and others “thought he was crazy…his theory was crazy, there was no validity,” Miller said.
Herschmann had a more pungent response. “Are you out of your f-ing mind,” he asked Dr. Eastman at one point.
Even at Fox News, reality was sinking in – although that was not the case they served up to viewers. In one message to White House staff, Sean Hannity feared that the president would soon lose the entire White House legal shop.
On January 5, Eastman was confronted again. (In my notes, I forgot to note who testified to this). He admitted that if his plan for Pence to overturn the vote ever reached the U.S. Supreme Court, it would lose 7-2. He hesitated a bit, and then admitted, okay, it would “lose 9-0.”
As the days passed, and the courts shot down one legal challenge after another, Team Trump was reduced to the craziest members of the crew. You had the vociferous Mike Lindell, who kept insisting magic would occur, and Trump would be inaugurated on January 20, 2021, and Biden would be cast into the deepest fires of hell. You had Gen. Michael Flynn, who was pushing for the president to send a few tanks to blue states and compel a new vote. And you had Rudy Giuliani, who would on January 6, itself, call the plan for Pence to overturn the electoral count “perfectly legal.”
Which none of the witness said was close to the truth.
Judge Luttig called the plan “the blueprint to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.” He said Eastman, the president, and the few remaining holdouts, “got wrapped around the axle” of logic and couldn’t extricate themselves. He testified, live, that had he been advising any vice president, John Adams in 1797, Thomas Jefferson in 1801, Richard Nixon in 1961, and now Pence (who did seek his advice), he “would have laid his body across the road” to stop Team Trump. “The centerpiece of the plot,” he said, was “constitutional mischief.” He was understating the case for once.
Trump lovers might insist: Well, what about Al Gore in 2001. He did challenge the result in the courts. Yes. He did. And with far more justification. The victory in 2001 hinged on one state: Florida. The margin was 532 votes. So Democrats did go to court – and when they lost, 5-4, in the U.S. Supreme Court, Gore conceded. He didn’t spend his remaining time in office howling that the fix was in. He certainly didn’t rail about a “rigged election” for the next year and a half. He wasn’t like Donald J. Trump.
In a rare appearance by a Democrat, the House Select Committee showed a clip of Gore himself. “The choice between your own personal disappointment and upholding the noble traditions of American democracy,” he said, “is a pretty obvious choice.”
Jacob admitted at one point that he hoped (he’s a Republican, by the way) that his party would win the next presidential election in 2024. That didn’t mean he believed President Trump had a legal leg to stand on concerning what happened the last time around. (I’m assuming, of course, that Jacob hopes the GOP comes up with a different nominee for president in two years.)
Short said, under oath, that he also fielded a call from former House Speaker Paul Ryan. He also agreed. Pence did not have power to decide the vote.
__________
“You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”
__________
In public, of course, President Trump was spinning a different story, a fairy tale without a fairy. At a rally in Valdosta, Georgia, on January 4, he called Pence “a great vice president.” On Fox News, the next day, Jason Miller, toadying the Trump line, predicted that the VP would “throw down” and do right.
Yet, at a meeting on January 4, in the White House, Jacob, Eastman, Pence and President Trump had already again fought it out. Eastman acknowledged the fact Congress would not support an outright rejection of the electoral votes. He asked for Pence to set votes aside, to go for a ten-day delay. Pence, Jacob testified, “never budged.”
The next day, oblivious to the truth – or not caring about the truth at all – Trump tweeted, “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.” Not even Eastman believed that was true. Still, on January 5, he reverted to his original plan. He again begged Pence to reject the votes.
On the right, there had been claims that Vice President Thomas Jefferson had rejected votes in 1801. That would be false. Jacob testified, live, that he was a small government person, believed in “originalism,” the idea that the Founding Fathers knew exactly what they were about. No way would they put so much power in one person’s hands. Dr. Eastman, he said, admitted behind closed doors that Jefferson did not assert authority to reject electoral votes. (What actually happened – and led to passage of the Twelfth Amendment, we shall be kind enough to explain below.)
What then was Eastman hoping would really happen. Jacob said he admitted he hoped the matter would end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. The judges would invoke the “political question” doctrine, and say it was up to Congress and the states to decide.
On the evening of January 5, Vice President Pence visited the White House for a talk with his boss. At that point, a raucous crowd of Trump supporters, had gathered nearby, and they were chanting their support. Trump again asked Pence to overturn the electoral account. Pence said again he did not have the power.
Here, admittedly, we turn to an account in the book Peril, written by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (“Fake News,” automatically, if you are one prone to believe in the basic fairy tale). This conversation was highlighted briefly, during the hearings themselves. As described in Peril, Trump responded to Pence’s claim that he lacked authority by gesturing to the crowd. “Well, what if these people say you do?”
Think about that a moment, if you have any doubt about why Trump had called for his supporters to come to D.C. on January 6. “Will be wild,” he had promised. Did he want the crowd of his supporters to change the outcome.
It would appear he did.
“If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to,” President Trump added.
“I wouldn’t want any one person to have that authority,” the VP replied.
“But wouldn’t it almost be cool to have that power,” Trump said.
Sure, in an authoritarian world, remaining in power, even if the vote went the wrong way. Yes. That would be cool.
Or so the narcissist in the Oval Office believed.
According to their sources, when Pence made it clear he had no power to ignore any of the votes, Trump replied, “You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”
Then fury took over. “You’ve betrayed us,” Trump said. “I made you. You were nothing. Your career is over if you do this.”
And Pence still did.
On the morning of January 6, Pence made one last call to the President of the United States. He said again, he would not set aside any of the electoral votes. One witness testified that the president called Pence a “wimp.” Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, admitted Ivanka’s dad called Pence “the p-word.”
By 2:00 p.m. that day, if not earlier, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had been clearly informed of the violence at the Capitol. Yet, at 2:24, the president tweet-attacked Pence again, saying he lacked courage to do what was right. Sarah Matthews, a White House aide, recalled thinking, “that was the last thing that needed to be tweeted at that moment. The situation was already bad, so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire.” Two minutes later, Pence and his family were rushed down a back stairway to a safe location in the Capitol. The mob was then within forty feet.
__________
“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”
__________
Even in the wake of all the violence, Dr. Eastman called Herschmann again on January 7, and said he hoped Herschmann could still somehow stop the certification from going through. Herschmann told him he only wanted to hear “two f-ing words – ‘orderly transition.’” A few days later, Eastman sent a message to Rudy Giuliani, having finally figured something real and true out. “I’ve decided,” he wrote, “that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”
Luttig, as witness, had the final word. The efforts of Donald J Trump, to overturn the results of the 2020 election represented “the most reckless, insidious, calamitous failures in both legal and political judgment in American history.” What happened on January 6 was not the end of the danger. “Donald trump and his allies and supporters,” the judge said, “are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
In closing, he admitted he would never have “uttered one such word” before.
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