January 6 panel to show how pressure from Trump put Pence's life in danger
The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol on Thursday will reveal new evidence about Donald Trump’s last-gasp attempt to pressure his vice-president, Mike Pence, to reject the electoral count, an act without historical precedent that it says “directly contributed” to the violent insurrection.
The panel said it will aim to show how an increasingly desperate Trump became fixated on a 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 presidential election. The vice-president does not have such power.
The panel will argue that Trump’s embrace of this scheme – and his public and private pressure campaign on Pence – put the then 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.
The panel will hear from one witness, Greg Jacob, who served as counsel to Pence when he was vice-president, that Eastman’s plot to nullify the results of the 2020 election was unlawful from its conception. Though it ultimately failed, Jacob will warn that it imperiled the American democratic experiment.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/january-6-panel-to-show-how-pressure-from-trump-put-pence-s-life-in-danger/ar-AAYxvXM
