Jan. 6 committee holds third hearing

The House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection on Thursday detailed how former President Donald Trump tried to pressure his vice president to join in his scheme to overturn the presidential election — and how Pence’s refusal put his life in danger as rioters called for Pence’s hanging on Jan. 6, 2021.

Two witnesses testified during Thursday’s hearing who advised Pence that he did not have the authority to subvert the election: former Pence attorney Greg Jacob and retired Republican judge J. Michael Luttig.

The committee walked through how conservative Trump attorney John Eastman put forward a legal theory that Pence could unilaterally block certification of the election — a theory that was roundly rejected by Trump’s White House attorneys and Pence’s team but nevertheless was embraced by the former President.

The next committee hearing is scheduled for this upcoming Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET. The witnesses have not yet been announced.

Here are the key takeaways from the committee’s third hearing this month:

Trump was told that Eastman’s election plan was wrong — but tried it anyway: There were many revelations, but the perhaps most important one: Trump was told repeatedly that his plan for Pence to overturn the election on January 6 was illegal, but he tried to do it anyway.

According to witness testimony, Pence himself and the lawyer who concocted the scheme advised Trump directly that the plan was unconstitutional and violated federal law. Committee members argued that this shows Trump’s corrupt intentions, and could lay the groundwork for a potential indictment.

In a videotaped deposition, which was played Thursday, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short said Pence advised Trump “many times” that he didn’t have the legal or constitutional authority to overturn the results while presiding over the joint session of Congress on January 6 to count the electoral votes.

Even Eastman, who helped devise the scheme and pitched it to Trump, admitted in front of Trump that the plan would require Pence to violate federal law, according to a clip of a deposition from Jacob, Pence’s senior legal adviser, which was played at Thursday’s hearing.

Legal scholars from across the political spectrum agree that Eastman’s plan was preposterous. Luttig, the former federal judge who advised Pence during the transition, testified at Thursday’s hearing that he “would have laid my body across the road” before letting Pence illegally overturn the election.

The panel tied the Mike Pence pressure campaign to the Jan. 6, 2021, violence: The committee tried to connect Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, by weaving together testimony from Pence aides, Trump’s public statements and comments from rioters at the Capitol.

Some of the most compelling evidence came from the rioters themselves.

Many of them had listened to Trump’s rallies where he claimed — inaccurately — that the election was rigged against him, and Pence had the power to do something about it while presiding over the Electoral College certification. While the insurrection was underway, they cited Trump’s comments about Pence.

And many of them saw, in real-time, Trump’s tweet criticizing Pence while the Capitol was under attack, where he said Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

The point of highlighting this on Thursday was to lay the blame for the violence at Trump’s feet. And right after the attack, many top Republicans agreed with that conclusion. But over the last year and a half, many Republicans have shied away from blaming Trump, and the committee hopes to change that.

Former Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann told the committee that Eastman told him he was willing to accept violence in order to overturn the 2020 election. The panel played video from Herschmann’s deposition where he described a conversation with Eastman about his claims that the vice president could overturn the election in Congress.

Herschmann warned Eastman that his strategy, if implemented, was “going to cause riots in the streets.”

“And he said words to the effect of, ‘There’s been violence in the history of our country in order to protect the democracy, or to protect the republic,’ ” Herschmann said.

Eastman emailed Giuliani about receiving a presidential pardon after Jan. 6 Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani a few days after Jan. 6, 2021, and asked to be included on a list of potential recipients of a presidential pardon, the committee revealed during Thursdays hearing. The committee said Eastman made the request to Giuliani, Trump’s former attorney, in an email.

“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” the email from Eastman to Giuliani read.

Eastman did not ultimately receive a pardon and refused to answer the committee’s questions about his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, repeatedly pleading the Fifth during his deposition.

The committee argued during Thursday’s hearing that Eastman’s request for a pardon, and his decision to repeatedly plead the Fifth when questioned previously by the panel, indicates Eastman knew his actions were potentially criminal.

The star of Thursday’s hearing was not in the room: One person noticeably absent on Thursday was the star of the hearing himself: the former vice president.

The committee cast Pence as the hero — making the case that American democracy would have slipped into a state of chaos had he succumbed to Trump’s pressure campaign.

But as the committee touted Pence’s commitment to the Constitution and bravery on Jan. 6, 2021, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the former vice president was not in the room.

Instead, the committee relied on live witness testimony from two former Pence advisers who appeared to speak on his behalf.

Earlier this year, the committee’s chairman, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, had suggested the committee would seek testimony from Pence. Still, the prospect of Pence appearing before the committee, particularly in public, has always been viewed as a long shot — to say the least.

Read more more takeaways from today’s hearing here.

Video testimony from two aides of former President Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — Ben Williamson and Sarah Matthews — was shown during Thursday’s Jan. 6 select committee hearing.

The committee has spoken to a number of people in Meadows’ orbit as a way to get around the fact that Meadows himself refused to comply with their subpoena.

Today’s hearing offered up a hint of the insight that these aides had, many of them were in and around the oval office and West Wing on Jan. 6, 2021. The committee is still expected to feature them even more prominently in the hearings still to come.  

Several of these witnesses have come back for additional interviews with the committee in the weeks leading up to the hearings.

While, the committee shared testimony today from Williamson and Matthews, the one Meadows aide expected to reveal even more information is Cassidy Hutchinson who has sat for several closed-door interviews with the committee and is believed to have insider information about Meadows and his conduct leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar, a member of the Jan. 6 select committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that while the committee is open to hearing from more witnesses, their current focus is on the scheduled hearings. The committee’s next two hearings are scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday at 1 p.m. ET.

Asked if the committee would like to hear from additional people, like Ginni Thomas — a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — Aguilar said he would not get into specifics regarding potential witnesses, but that the panel is honing in on the current witness testimony and is “not going to close the door” to anyone.

Following Thursday’s hearing, committee chair Bennie Thompson said the panel had sent a letter to Ginni Thomas asking her to speak with them about her role in the effort to overturn the 2020 electoral results.

“Our threshold test has and will always be whether someone can provide information that is relevant to the Jan. 6 committee. We’re talking about protecting democracy and the threat we faced leading up to Jan 6. And it wasn’t just about one day, it was about this concerted effort that we have continued to talk about building up to Jan. 6. So individuals who have knowledge should come forward. Whether that’s Kevin McCarthy or Barry Loudermilk, or Ginni Thomas,” Aguilar said.

The Jan. 6 committee is in possession of email correspondence between conservative attorney John Eastman and Ginni Thomas, a source familiar with the committee’s investigation told CNN. The source who spoke with CNN would not provide details on the emails’ contents or say if they were direct messages between the two or part of a larger group correspondence. The Washington Post first reported on the emails.

Asked if the committee is open to the notion of hearing from former Vice President Mike Pence, Aguilar said he felt the committee made “a clear and compelling” case Thursday that Pence was in danger on Jan. 6, 2021. Aguilar reiterated that the committee is focused on the upcoming hearings.

“We feel we heard from his chief counsel, who had those experiences. We’re not gonna close the door to hearing from anyone. But what I can tell you, is that we are gonna have a specific set of hearings in the next few weeks, our focus is on making sure that those hearings help convey just how fragile our democracy is and how close we came to democracy having serious, serious concerns that day,” Aguilar said.

“So, we are going to help tell that story and we are going to do it in a truthful and honest way,” he added. “But If there is still room to have conversations with anybody after that, we are not going to shy away from it, our work will continue.”

CNN’s Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen, Annie Grayer, Katelyn Polantz and Chandelis Duster, contributed to this report.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol wrapped up its third hearing of the month. The panel presented evidence that outlined former President Donald Trump’s role in pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence into blocking the 2020 election results.

Through live testimony from former Pence attorney Greg Jacob and retired judge J. Michael Luttig, recorded depositions and excerpts from emails and memos, the committee showed that Trump was told the plan to reverse the results of the election was not legal but he tried it anyway.

The investigation also walked through former Trump lawyer John Eastman’s theory that Pence had the authority to overturn the election — a theory he later admitted would fail at the Supreme Court 9-0.

Here are other top headlines from the second half of Thursday’s hearing:

After Thursday’s public hearing, House select committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson told CNN and other reporters that they have sent a letter to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, asking her to talk to the panel in light of new emails that show she was communicating with conservative lawyer John Eastman.

“We have sent Ms. Thomas a letter asking her to come and talk to the committee,” he said when asked by CNN about Thomas. 

He also dismissed the Department of Justice pressing that the committee release all witness interview transcripts to help with its investigation.

“We are not going to stop what we are doing to share the information that we’ve gotten so far with the Department of Justice. We have to do our work,” he said.  

Asked if the committee could release transcripts by the end of the week, he responded “no,” but added “that does not mean that we are not going to cooperate.”

Asked whether his view against referring former President Donald Trump to the Justice Department for prosecution has changed, he told CNN, “Our committee is working. We’re working as hard as we can to get to the facts and circumstances around what happened. Now, as to when we complete our work, then we’ll discuss at that point what we’ll do.”

Read more here.

Former Trump attorney John Eastman “categorically” denied that he had discussions with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni Thomas about “any matters pending or likely to come before the Court.”

“We have never engaged in such discussions, would not engage in such discussions, and did not do so in December 2020 or anytime else,” Eastman wrote in a post on his Substack.

He suggested that a recently reported email he sent in December 2020, in which he stated that he understood there to be “a heated fight underway” at the Supreme Court, prompted a report by an outlet called Vision Times.

In the Thursday post to his Substack, Eastman also responded to reports that the House Jan. 6 committee had obtain an email exchange between him and Ginni Thomas.

He published a Dec. 4, 2020, email from Thomas and said she had “invited me to give an update about election litigation to a group she met with periodically.”

In the email — which Thomas sent to Eastman and to others copied whose identities have been redacted — Ginni asked the recipients if they could “present a status update to a group of grassroots state leaders on Tuesday, Dec 8th at 3:00 ET at a gathering called Frontliners that [redacted] helps me with.”

She also asked for a mailing address for Christmas cards, according to the email published by Eastman.

The email matches a description of a document referenced in the litigation over the Eastman emails the committee has sought. 

The judge presiding over the case, Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California, described in a June 6 order requiring the disclosure of certain Eastman materials to the committee four documents pertaining “to a meeting on December 8, 2020.”

Carter said that “two emails are the group’s high-profile leader inviting Dr. Eastman to speak at the meeting, and two contain the meeting’s agenda.”

“Based on the agenda, Dr. Eastman discussed ‘State legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden,’” Carter said. “Another speaker gave an ‘update on [state] legislature actions regarding electoral votes.’”

Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the Jan. 6 select committee, urged people who might want to cooperate with the panel or have additional evidence pertaining to their investigation to submit to a tip line the committee has set up.

“I know the information we presented over the last week is shocking. The idea that a President of the United States would orchestrate a scheme to stay in power after the people had voted him out of office,” Thompson said during his closing remarks. “We’re able to present this information because so many witnesses have cooperated with our probe. But the fact is, there are more people with direct knowledge —with evidence —germane to our investigation. I ask those who might be on the fence about cooperating to reach out to us.”

Thompson referenced the committee’s website — january6th.house.gov — as the place where individuals can view the evidence that has been presented by the committee and find a tip line on the website where they can “submit any information that you might think would be helpful for our investigation.”

More than 1,000 people have testified already before the committee behind closed doors, from Cabinet secretaries to low-level White House aides. 

“And despite how you may not think it’s important, send us what you think,” Thompson added. The chair also thanked those who have already cooperated for their “bravery and patriotism.”

CNN’s David Shortell contributed reporting to this post.

The House Jan. 6 select committee’s third hearing this month just wrapped up. 

The panel detailed how former President Donald Trump tried to pressure his vice president to join in his scheme to overturn the presidential election — and how Mike Pence’s refusal put his life in danger as rioters called for Pence’s hanging on Jan. 6, 2021.

The committee’s next hearing is scheduled for 1 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

Former Vice President Mike Pence did not want to be seen as fleeing the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to testimony provided to the House Select Committee by advisers and aides who were working for him at the time.

Pence’s whereabouts on Jan. 6 as pro-Trump rioters began to breach the Capitol has been a topic of intrigue since security footage emerged showing the former vice president being evacuated from the building by his Secret Service detail.

The committee showed on Thursday images of Pence on his phone in a secure location after being evacuated and witnesses provided new details about how he resisted Secret Service orders to get into a car.

“When we got down to the secure location, secret service directed us to get into the cars, which I did, and then I noticed that the vice president had not,” Greg Jacob, former chief counsel to Pence, testified during the hearing. “So I got out of the car that I had gotten into, and I understood the vice president had refused to get into the car.”

“The head of his Secret Service detail, Tim said, ‘I assure you we’re not going to drive out of the building with your permission.’ And the vice president had said something to the effect of, ‘Tim, I know you, I trust you, but you’re not the one behind the wheel,” Jacob said.

“And the vice president did not want to take any chance that the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol. He was determined that we would complete the work that we had set out to do that day,” he added.

Jacob also said Pence and his wife Karen reacted “with frustration” that Trump never called to check on them as a mob overran the Capitol building with Pence in their sights

Pence and Trump’s relationship soured deeply in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021 congressional session, as Pence made clear that he would not comply with the scheme to overturn the election results that Trump was pushing. 

Trump, in turn, began to turn on his vice president in his public remarks, stirring up his supporters’ anger. 

For his part, as he worked from a secure location in the Capitol, Pence reached out to congressional leaders, the acting defense secretary, and others “to check on their safety and to address the growing crisis,” Aguilar said Thursday. 

CNN’s David Shortell contributed reporting to this post.

Conservative attorney John Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani a few days after Jan. 6 and asked to be included on a list of potential recipients of a presidential pardon, the House Select Committee revealed during Thursday’s hearing. 

The committee said Eastman made the request to Giuliani, former President Donald Trump’s former attorney, in an email that is in its possession.  

Eastman did not ultimately receive a pardon and refused to answer the House select committee’s questions about his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, repeatedly pleading the Fifth Amendment during his deposition. 

The committee argued during Thursday’s hearing that Eastman’s requests for a pardon, and his decision to repeatedly plead the Fifth when questioned previously by the panel, indicates Eastman knew his actions were potentially criminal. 

CNN previously reported that Giuliani and other Trump associates had raised the idea of receiving preemptive pardons in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, but the US Capitol riot had complicated his desire to pardon himself, his kids and personal lawyer. 

At the time, several of Trump’s closest advisers also urged him not to grant clemency to anyone involved in the Jan. 6 attack, despite Trump’s initial stance that those involved had done nothing wrong.

The House Jan. 6 committee laid out a thorough timeline at today’s hearing detailing the effort to protect Vice President Mike Pence as rioters breached the Capitol. As part of its presentation, the committee made clear that Pence was perilously close to the pro-Trump mob, and that at one point there was only “40 feet between the vice president and the mob.”

Showing video of the riot and a 3-D graphic rendering of the Capitol, the committee presented an exhibit with voiceover narration outlining the following timeline:

Following display of the exhibit, committee member Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar added the following detail: “Approximately 40 feet — that’s all there was. Forty feet between the vice president and the mob.”

“Make no mistake about the fact that the vice president’s life was in danger,” he said.

Even after the Capitol riot was over, the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 showed that former President Donald Trump’s lawyer John Eastman wrote an email that night at 11:44 p.m. ET imploring Greg Jacob, former Vice President Pence’s counsel, to suspend the session to certify the election.

Jacob said he did not show Pence the email right away, but shared it a “day or two later.”

Eastman raised a technical violation of the Electoral Count Act, the law that governed the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the electors. He argued that because the House and Senate had violated the law to the letter by debating the objection for more than two hours, Pence could violate it further by adjourning for 10 days.

“So now that the precedent has been set that the Electoral Count Act is not quite so sacrosanct as was previously claimed, I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations,” Eastman wrote.

After reviewing the email, Pence called it “rubber room stuff,” according to Jacob.

“I understood it to mean that after having seen it play out, what happens when you convince people that there is a decision to be made in the Capitol legitimately about who is to be the President and the consequences of that, he was still pushing us to do what he had been asking us to do for the previous two days, that that was certifiably crazy,” Jacob said.

Former President Donald Trump sent a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021 after he was told by his then-chief of staff Mark Meadows there was violence breaking out at the Capitol, committee member Rep. Pete Aguilar, a Democrat from California, revealed Thursday.  

At 2:24 p.m. ET, eleven minutes after rioters breached the Capitol building, according to the committee, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” 

According to Aguilar, the committee’s “investigation found that immediately after the President’s 2:24 p.m. ET tweet, the crowds both outside the Capitol and inside the Capitol surged.”

After the tweet, Aguilar said the mob was able to overwhelm police. Pence was evacuated at 2:26 p.m. ET — two minutes after Trump’s tweet — to a loading dock under the Senate plaza.  

According to previous testimony given to the committee by Meadows’ aide Ben Williamson and White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, Meadows went to tell Trump about the violence at the Capitol before Trump sent the tweet targeting Pence.  

“We had all talked about — at that point about how it was bad and, you know, the situation was getting out of hand,” Matthews said in video testimony played during the hearing. “We thought that the President needed to tweet something and tweet something immediately.”

On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Mike Pence’s former attorney Greg Jacob said he was at the vice president’s residence when he got a call from former President Donald Trump. Jacob testified that he and several other people were there finalizing Pence’s statement which was set to be put out later that day.

He said Pence stepped out of the room to take the call from Trump and no staff went with him.

Although Jacob couldn’t hear the conversation, the House select committee investigating the insurrection said Trump did have several family members with him in the Oval Office on the other line of the phone. The committee played a video that featured clips of testimony from several people who were in the room with Trump during that call.

“When I entered the office the second time, he was on the telephone with who I later found out was the vice president,” Ivanka Trump said in the video. “The conversation was pretty heated,” she added.

“I think until it became somewhat of a louder tone, I don’t think anyone was paying attention to it really,” former White House attorney Eric Herschmann said.

Nicholas Luna, a former special assistant to Trump, said he was dropping off a note and 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.” It had not been publicly disclosed before that Radford spoke to the committee.

Radford said she was told that Trump had called Pence “the P-word,” referencing a derogatory term.

Watch full moment here:

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CNN’s Jeremy Herb contributed reporting to this post.

The Justice Department pressed the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot to turn over transcripts of witness interviews, noting that refusing to turn over the documents is leading to delays in the department’s efforts to investigate and prosecute criminal suspects involved in the attack on the Capitol. 

Prosecutors released a letter from top officials overseeing the department’s Jan. 6 criminal investigation to the committee’s chief investigative lawyer, as the committee’s third public hearing is unfolding on national television.

“It is now readily apparent that the interviews the Select Committee conducted are not just potentially relevant to our criminal investigations, but are likely relevant to specific prosecutions that have already commenced,” according to the letter, included in a court filing seeking to delay the trial of members of the Proud Boys, the right-wing extremist group accused of helping to lead the breach at the Capitol. 

Prosecutors asked the committee in April for the access to about 1,000 witness transcripts that lawmakers so far have refused to provide. The delay has frustrated Justice Department officials, who have faced pressure from members of the Jan. 6 committee to move more quickly on politically sensitive prosecutions beyond the rioters. Justice officials say that the committee’s criticism of the department are in conflict with the committee’s own role in delaying some of prosecutors’ work. 

The letter added that “the select Committee’s failure to grant the Department access to these transcripts complicates the Department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct in relation to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”

The letter was released in a joint bid by prosecutors and two members of Proud Boys leadership to delay their trial, which is currently scheduled to begin in August, until December. 

The committee’s hearings have repeatedly mentioned the Proud Boys – including naming at least one defendant in this case, Joe Biggs – and has featured testimony from uncharged members of Proud Boys leadership. 

Prosecutors previously revealed that they learned the select committee was planning to release transcripts from their investigation in September, potentially coinciding with the trial of five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the riot. The Justice Department had already asked for the transcripts, Prosecutor Jason McCullough said earlier this month, but that those requests had been denied.

The judge in the case, Judge Timothy Kelly, said earlier this month that despite the committee’s public hearings, he did not believe the trial needed to be postponed and that what the committee does “is beyond the power of anyone around our table here today.”

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol is back after taking a short break. 

The Jan. 6 committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol is taking a short break during its third public hearing this month. The panel is presenting evidence that it says shows former President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count 2020 electoral votes.

So far, the panel has heard live testimony from former Pence attorney Greg Jacob and retired Republican judge J. Michael Luttig.

The committee is focusing on Trump attorney John Eastman’s theory that the Vice President had the authority to overturn the election results.

Pence never believed he had the authority to unilaterally reject Electoral College votes, Jacob said in his testimony. He also said Eastman acknowledged to him that his theory would lose at the Supreme Court 9-0.

If you’re just catching up now, here are the other key moments you might have missed:

Then-President Donald Trump lied to the press when — on the eve of Jan. 6, 2021 — he released a statement claiming then-Vice President Mike Pence supported his plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to testimony from a former senior Pence aide during the Jan. 6 committee hearing on Thursday.

Trump, Pence and other top aides met in the Oval Office on Jan. 5 to discuss the upcoming joint session of Congress, where lawmakers would formally certify Joe Biden’s victory. Pence and his team told Trump that there was nothing Pence could do during those proceedings to undo Trump’s defeat.

After the meeting, The New York Times reported about what happened. After the story was published, Trump put out a press release saying that “the Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.”

But that was a “false” statement that “misrepresented the Vice President’s viewpoint,” Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, said in a videotaped deposition, a clip of which was played Thursday. 

Short also said he was “irritated” by Trump’s statement and “expressed displeasure” during a heated phone call with Jason Miller, who was a senior spokesperson for the Trump campaign at the time.

Pence’s former top lawyer Greg Jacob testified that “we were shocked and disappointed” when they saw the statement, “because whoever had written and put that statement out, it was categorically untrue.”

Most of the statement was personally dictated by Trump, according to a clip of Miller’s testimony.

This was just one of thousands of false statements and lies that Trump publicly made throughout his presidency, according to fact-checkers who evaluated every utterance from his four years in office.

In a question that Jan. 6 committee member Rep. Pete Aguilar phrased to former Vice President Mike Pence’s attorney Greg Jacob about a meeting between then-President Donald Trump, Pence, and conservative attorney John Eastman on Jan. 4, 2021, Aguilar revealed a key term of Jacob’s agreement to testify — that he would not discuss the direct conversations between Trump and Pence.

Aguilar was asking Jacob — who served as chief counsel to Pence — about what was said in that January meeting, but acknowledged that Jacob would not answer any questions about what was said between Trump and Pence directly.

So instead, Aguilar phrased his question more broadly and asked Jacob whether Pence ever wavered in his position that he could not delay certification.  

Ivan Raiklin, the man mentioned by name during Thursday’s hearing as having posted a memo called the “Operation Pence Card,” is a known associate of former President Donald Trump’s one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The memo outlined a theory that the vice president could block certification of the election results on Jan. 6.

Raiklin has worked with Flynn and a group of other former military service members to spread various unfounded theories about how the 2020 election was compromised – an effort that began weeks before Jan. 6 and continued months after. 

They have also been heavily involved in efforts to file lawsuits and audits in various states challenging the election outcome. 

Raiklin first posted the “Pence Card” document on his social media accounts in mid-December 2020. 

Trump appeared to endorse the plan, retweeting one of Raiklin’s posts about the “Pence Card” on Dec. 23, 2020.

Raiklin posted his plan weeks before conservative attorney John Eastman drafted his own memo outlining a similar plan, which was embraced by Trump despite warnings it was not legally sound. 

Raiklin served as a Green Beret and at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has known Flynn for several years.

Former Vice President Mike Pence never believed he had the authority to unilaterally reject Electoral College votes, Pence’s former chief counsel Greg Jacob testified to the House select committee on Thursday.

“The Vice President’s first instinct was that there was no way that any one person, particularly the Vice President who is on the ticket and has a vested outcome in the election, could possibly have the authority to decide it by rejecting electors or to decisively alter the outcome by suspending the joint session for the first time in history in order to try to get a different outcome from state legislatures” Jacob testified.

Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, told the committee in an earlier recorded deposition that Pence consulted with former Vice President Dan Quayle, who confirmed Pence’s view that he had only a ceremonial role in counting the Electoral College votes.

Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer John Eastman said he did not believe other vice presidents, such as Al Gore after the 2000 election or Kamala Harris after the eventual 2024 election, could overturn elections — but he wanted former then-Vice President Mike Pence to do so, Pence’s former counsel Greg Jacob told the Jan. 6 committee.

“This was one of the many points that we discussed on Jan. 5. [Eastman] had come into that meeting trying to persuade us that there was some validity to his theory. I viewed it as my objective to persuade him to acknowledge he was just wrong, and I thought this had to be one of the most powerful arguments,” Jacob said.

Jacob said he told Eastman, “‘John, back in 2000, you weren’t jumping up and saying, Al Gore had this authority to do that. You would not want Kamala Harris to be able to exercise that kind of authority in 2024, when I hope Republicans will win the election. And I know you hope that too, John.’ And he said, ‘Absolutely. Al gore did not have a basis to do it in 2000. Kamala Harris shouldn’t be able to do it in 2024. But I think you should do it today.’”

Remember: No vice president has ever tried to overturn an election using the scheme that Eastman proposed, and his theories have been condemned as anti-democratic by a wide array of legal experts.

Previous vice presidents had to preside over the Electoral College process that cemented their defeats, like Richard Nixon did after the 1960 election and Al Gore after the 2000 election and Florida recount.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge who advised former Vice President Mike Pence, said he “would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice president overturn the 2020 election.”

“In short, if I had been advising the vice president of the United States on Jan. 6 — and even if then-Vice President Jefferson and even then-Vice President John Adams and even then-Vice President Richard Nixon had done exactly what the president of the United States wanted his vice president to do, I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice president overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent. But what this body needs to know, and now America needs to know, is that that was the centerpiece of the plan to overturn the 2020 election,” he said.

Luttig said “all the players” in the effort not to certify the 2020 election results “got wrapped around the axle by the historical evidence claim by Mr. Eastman,” referring to John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who helped craft the scheme to overturn the election results on Jan. 6.

He called it “constitutional mischief.”

Some context: Witnesses and lawmakers are citing the 12th Amendment frequently during today’s hearing and here’s why: The 12th Amendment outlines the electoral vote counting process and how a president and vice president of the United States will be certified into office.

Former President Donald Trump and Eastman perpetuated a false theory that the vice president could overturn the electoral college results, undermining the process stated in the 12th Amendment.

According to the 12th Amendment, “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; —The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President.”

The House Select Committee highlighted on Thursday how Trump attorney John Eastman knew his plan to try to block the election would fail if it went to the Supreme Court — yet the right-wing attorney continued to fuel Trump’s hope. 

“When I pressed him on the point, I said, ‘John, if the Vice President did what you were asking him to do, we would lose 9-nothing at the Supreme Court,’” Greg Jacob, chief counsel to then-Vice President Mike Pence, testified. 

Jacob said Eastman first tried to say the Supreme Court would land at 7-2 in their vote, if it came to them, then admitted his legal theory would lose 9-0, Jacob said. 

Eastman’s legal theory was to have Pence unilaterally decide the results of the election, the House public hearing on Thursday has explained.

Jacob previously told the anecdote behind closed doors to the House – and that testimony became a cornerstone of the House’s argument that Eastman and Trump likely engaged in planning a crime. A federal judge has agreed with their argument. 

Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar, member of the Jan. 6 select committee, discussed how testimony given to the committee outlined concerns White House counsel and others had over the false theory that Vice President Pence could overturn the 2020 election results.

Fox host Sean Hannity even reached out to the White House, expressing concerns that the White House counsel would resign over the perpetuation of the false theory.

“In fact, there was a risk that the lawyers and the White House counsel’s office would resign. For example, Fox News host Sean Hannity expressed concern that the entire White House counsel’s office could quit — as you could see from these texts —Mr. Hannity wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that, ‘We can’t lose the entire WH counsel’s office. I do NOT see January 6 happening the way he has been told,’” Aguilar said.

Hannity wrote to Meadows again a few days later on Jan. 5, 2021, reiterating his concern about the counsel’s office resigning.

The Fox host reached out to the White House numerous times between Election Day 2020 and President Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021, according to texts obtained by CNN that Meadows provided to the Jan. 6 select committee.

Read part of the Hannity and Meadows text exchange:

Greg Jacob, former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief counsel, told the House select committee on Thursday that Pence’s legal team reviewed every election in American history as they examined whether a sitting vice president had the authority to reject Electoral College votes.

“We examined the Electoral Count Act, we examined practice under the Electoral Count Act, and critically, no vice president in 230 years of history had ever claimed to have that kind of authority,” Jacob said.

“In the entire history of the United States, not once had a joint session ever returned electoral votes back to the states to be counted,” he said.

Jacob also testified that he told Trump lawyer John Eastman, who pushed the theory, that if the vice president did have that power, it would stand to reason that Democrats would have discovered the “obvious quirk” and that Al Gore would have tried to declare himself president in 2000.

“And of course [Eastman] acknowledged Al Gore did not and should not have had that authority at that point in time,” Jacob testified Thursday.

Former Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann told the Jan. 6 Committee that conservative attorney John Eastman told him he was willing to accept violence in order to overturn the 2020 election.

The committee played video from Herschmann’s deposition where he described a conversation with Eastman about his claims that Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the election in Congress.

 “I said, ‘Are you out of your effing mind?’” Herschmann said. “That was pretty blunt. I said, ‘You’re completely crazy.’ I said, ‘You’re going to turn around and tell 78 million people in this country that your theory is this is how you’re going to invalidate their votes. Because you think the election was stolen.”

Herschmann continued by telling Eastman: “They’re not going to tolerate that. You’re going to cause riots in the streets.”

Herschmann’s interview was played as part of a video montage where numerous former Trump advisers said that Eastman’s views that Trump could overturn the election were “crazy” and did not have any validity.

Trump campaign spokesperson Jason Miller told the committee in a deposition that White House counsel Pat Cipollone “though the idea was nutty” and had confronted Eastman about it.

Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, said that Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows told him “a couple of times” that he understood the vice president did not have a role to block the certification of presidential electors.

“I believe that Mark did agree,” Short said of Meadows.

Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann told the House Select Committee that former President Donald Trump’s then-attorney, Rudy Giuliani, seemed to concede on the morning of Jan. 6 that the vice president did not have the authority to decide the outcome of the election or send it back to the states.

During Thursday’s public hearing, the committee played previously unseen video from Herschmann’s closed-door deposition where recalls his conversation with Giuliani on the morning of US Capitol riot where he appeared to break with conservative attorney John Eastman on the “VP’s role.”

“He was asking me my view and analysis and the practical implications of it. And when we finished, he said, ‘Look, I believe, that you know, you’re probably right,’” Herschmann said, describing how Giuliani ultimately acknowledged that former Vice President Mike Pence likely did not have the authority to do what Trump was asking.

Still, Giuliani’s conversation with Herschmann did not stop him from saying the exact opposite just hours later while on stage at the Trump rally while standing alongside Eastman.

“Every single thing that has been outlined as the plan for today is perfectly legal,” Giuliani said during his speech on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse. “I have Professor Eastman here with me to say a few words about that.”

“It is perfectly appropriate … that the vice president can … decide on the validity of these crooked ballots, or he can send it back to the legislators, give them five to 10 days to finally finish the work, Giuliani added.

Herschmann is just one of several witnesses who have testified about how those closest to Trump and the former President himself, were warned that their plan to overturn the election was on shaky legal ground but they continued to pursue it any way. 

Even John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who helped craft the scheme to overturn the election results on Jan. 6, 2021, knew his legal theory was bogus, the House select committee argued Thursday. 

In a document revealed in the committee’s third public hearing, Eastman picks apart a proposal that former Vice President Mike Pence could determine which electors to count in the Jan. 6 congressional session.

Writing comments in a blue font into an October 2020 draft letter to then-President Donald Trump, Eastman pointed out that “the 12th Amendment only says that the President of the Senate opens the ballots in the joint session and then, in the passive voice, that the votes shall then be counted.”

“Nowhere does it suggest that the President of the Senate gets to make the determination on his own,” he continued, referring to Pence in his role as the head of the Senate.

“The person writing in blue eviscerates that argument,” committee member Rep. Pete Aguilar said.

J. Michael Luttig, an adviser to vice president Mike Pence and a former judge, testified that Trump attorney John Eastman’s claims that the vice president could decide the outcome of the election at the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is not supported by the Constitution and does not follow any historical president.

Committee vice chair Liz Cheney explained a memo written by Eastman outlined his theory. In it, Cheney said Eastman falsely claimed seven states “transmitted dual slates of electors to the President of the Senate,” which former Pence attorney Greg Jacob said they did not exist.

“He knew the outcome he wanted and he saw a way to go forward if he simply pretended the fake electors were real,” Cheney said, explaining that Eastman continued to spread the false theory. Cheney said Eastman argued that Pence could reject the Biden electors and declare Trump the winner in the states he said were “disputed.”

“There is a very solid legal authority, and historical precedent, for the view that the President of the Senate does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes,” the memo written by Eastman showed by the committee said.

“There was no support whatsoever in either the Constitution of the United States, nor the laws of the United States for the vice president, frankly, ever to count alternative electoral slates from the states that had not been officially certified,” Luttig said, testifying at the hearing.

Luttig said he read Eastman’s memo and knows what he was referring to when he argued there is a historical precedent, but said, “he was incorrect.”

In today’s hearing, two former advisers for former Vice President Mike Pence are testifying on how former President Trump attempted to pressure Pence into overturning the 2020 electoral college results.

Witnesses and lawmakers are citing the 12th Amendment frequently during today’s hearing and here’s why: The 12th Amendment outlines the electoral vote counting process and how a president and vice president of the United States will be certified into office.

Trump and his attorney John Eastman perpetuated a false theory that the vice president could overturn the electoral college results, undermining the process stated in the 12th Amendment.

According to the 12th Amendment: “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; —The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President.”

Read the full text of the 12th Amendment of the US Constitution here.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge who advised former Vice President Mike Pence, said that if Pence followed former President Donald Trump’s orders to reject the 2020 election result, it “would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis.”

Luttig added that he believes the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is examining the “profound truth” of the US.

“The foundational truth is the rule of law. That foundational truth is for the United States of America, the profound truth. But it’s not nearly the profound truth for the United States. It’s also the simple truth. The simple foundational truth of the American republic. Thus, in my view, the hearings being conducted by this select committee are examining that profound truth, namely the rule of law in the United States of America,” he said.

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s former counsel Greg Jacob explained how he learned of former President Donald Trump’s theory that a vice president can select the President of United States.

“The first time that I had a conversation with the vice president about the 12th amendment and the Electoral Count Act was in early December, around December 7. The vice president called me over to his West Wing office, and told me that he had been seeing and reading things that suggested that he had significant role to play on Jan. 6 in announcing the outcome of the election,” he said during the Jan. 6 committee hearing.

Pence “asked me, ‘mechanically, how does this work at the joint session? What are the rules,’” Jacob told the committee.

Jacob continued, saying he told Pence that he “had a fairly good idea” that “there aren’t rules that govern the joint session, but what there is, is a provision of the Constitution that’s just one sentence long, and then an Electoral Count Act that was passed in 1887.”

After a review of the applicable rules, Jacob said he concluded that the “sentence in the Constitution that is inartfully drafted.”

“The vice president’s first instinct when he heard this theory was that there was no way that our framers, who abhorred concentrated power and 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 in the outcome because they were on the ticket for the election — in a role to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election.”

“And our review of text, history, and frankly, just common sense, all confirmed 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.

Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, is discussing a memo from Trump attorney John Eastman, who perpetuated the theory that former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to overturn the election results when Congress certified Joe Biden’s victory.

Earlier this month, a federal judge decided the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection should get access this month to 159 emails of the right-wing attorney that largely relate to his efforts on behalf of Donald Trump to try to block the 2020 election result.

The judge — as he did previously related to another set of Eastman emails — decided one of the emails could be evidence of the planning of a crime, specifically Eastman and Trump’s efforts to thwart Congress certifying the election result on Jan. 6, 2021.

Judge David O. Carter allowed Eastman’s team until June 13 to turn over the 159 emails.

Eastman, as an attorney for Trump working to overturn the election result, will likely be a crucial figure in the House’s retelling. His emails, described now in court but not yet released publicly, may shed significant light on actions and thoughts of the closest ring of advisers around then-President Trump, and even Trump himself.

Read more about Eastman here.

J. Michael Luttig, a retired Republican judge and informal Mike Pence adviser, is testifying now in the Jan. 6 committee hearing.

He will provide a sharp condemnation of former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, saying Trump and his allies “instigated” a war on democracy “so that he could cling to power,” according to a written statement he intends to submit for the committee’s record obtained exclusively by CNN.

Luttig outlined in his statement how close he believed democracy came to the brink.

Luttig will testify at Thursday’s House select committee hearing on the US Capitol attack, which is focused on Trump’s pressure campaign against then-Vice President Mike Pence to try to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021.

Luttig was involved in advising the Pence team against claims from Trump allies like attorney John Eastman, who wrote a memo saying Pence had the power to single-handedly block the certification of the election for Joe Biden.

Luttig concluded that January 6 “was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost.”

The retired judge praised Pence for his actions on January 6 and his willingness to stand up to Trump and his allies. “There were many cowards on the battlefield on January 6,” Luttig wrote. “The Vice President was not among them.”

Read more about Luttig and his testimony here.

GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, opened today’s hearing by taking direct aim at former President Donald Trump.

“Today we’re focusing on President Trump’s relentless effort to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on January 6,” Cheney said.

She played a clip of Pence describing what happened in a speech. “President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence said.

Cheney went on to say:

“President Trump was told repeatedly that Mike Pence lacked the constitutional authority and legal authority to do what President Trump was demanding he do.”

Greg Jacob, who served as counsel to Mike Pence when he was vice president, is testifying now before the committee.

Thursday’s hearing from the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection will be all about Pence, who was at the center of former President Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.

As Pence’s general counsel, Jacob played a critical role in countering efforts to persuade the former vice president not to certify the electoral results.

He was part of the vice president’s team that pushed back against John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who embraced fringe legal theories about the vice president’s ability to overturn the election.

Former President Donald Trump was repeatedly told that his plan for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election on Jan. 6 was illegal, according to testimony revealed Thursday by the Jan. 6 committee.

Despite these warnings from Pence himself and the lawyer who concocted the scheme, Trump publicly and privately pressured Pence to go along with the plan, which committee members say shows Trump’s corrupt intentions. Pence refused to overturn the results. 

In a videotaped deposition, which was played Thursday, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short said Pence advised Trump “many times” that he didn’t have the legal or constitutional authority to overturn the results while presiding over the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to count the electoral votes.  

The vice president has a ceremonial role in those proceedings — and Trump wanted Pence to abuse that position to throw out Joe Biden’s electoral votes from key states, securing a second Trump term. 

Even John Eastman, the right-wing lawyer who helped devise the scheme and pitched it to Trump, admitted in front of Trump that the plan would require Pence to violate federal law, according to a clip of a deposition from Pence’s senior legal adviser Greg Jacob, which was played at Thursday’s hearing. 

The law in question is the Electoral Count Act, which was passed in 1887 and spells out the Electoral College process for states, and how Congress should handle disputed slates of presidential electors.

Jan. 6 committee member Rep. Pete Aguilar is speaking now in the third hearing of the panel and presenting some of the panel’s findings.

CNN had previously reported that much of Thursday’s presentation would be led by Aguilar and that the committee will use this hearing to make the case that then-President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on his vice president to overturn the 2020 presidential election “directly contributed” to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Aguilar is a Democrat from Southern California and before coming to Congress, he served as the mayor of Redlands, California.

Aguilar is considered a rising star in the House Democratic Caucus. As vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus he is the highest-ranking Latino member in congressional leadership.

In addition to his role on the Jan. 6 committee, Aguilar has several high-profile committee assignments. He also a member of the committees on Appropriations and House Administration.

Aguilar believes the committee’s most important job is creating a full, comprehensive record of what led to the violence of January 6.

“We are going to give the American public a full accounting of what happened the day of the violent attack on the US Capitol, an attack which sought to overturn the will of the voters and led to the deaths of five police officers,” he said. “These hearings will lay out the facts in a way that’s informative, accessible and compelling. I hope that this can be a moment for the country to come together and rally around our shared values. Those responsible for the violent attack must be held accountable.”

Read about the other committee members here.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, opened Thursday’s hearing by praising former Vice President Mike Pence for resisting former President Donald Trump’s “pressure campaign.”

The committee’s hearing is focused on how Trump and his allies tried to convince Pence that he could unilaterally overturn the election on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Donald Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice president has ever done. The former president wanted Pence to reject the votes and either declare Trump the winner or send the votes back to the states to be counted again,” Thompson said.

“Mike Pence said no. He resisted the pressure. He knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong. We’re fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage on Jan. 6. Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe. That courage put him in tremendous danger,” Thompson said.

The House select committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol has begun its third hearing of the month. 

The panel is expected to present findings that show then-President Trump’s efforts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. 

Two witnesses will testify:

Thursday’s hearing from the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection will be all about former Vice President Mike Pence, who was at the center of former President Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.

Committee aides say the hearing will make the case that Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence had “directly contributed” to the violence on Jan. 6, which placed Pence’s life in danger as rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”

Aides say the hearing will include new materials and documents about Pence’s movements on Jan. 6, 2021 and what he was doing when the Senate chamber was forced to evacuate after rioters breached the US Capitol.

The hearing will focus on Trump attorney John Eastman’s theory that Pence had the authority to overturn the election results when Congress certified Joe Biden’s victory

Here’s what else to know:

Read more about what to expect and what to watch for here.

In today’s hearing focused on the effort by former President Donald Trump to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to stand in the way of the certification of the 2020 election, the committee will detail numerous examples of Trump being informed by attorneys he trusted and or appointed that the legal challenges were without merit.  

Despite that advice, Trump ignored those voices and went in search of lawyers that would essentially tell him what he wanted to hear.  

House select committee sources say the committee will detail in specificity through evidence and witness testimony, how attorney after attorney warned Trump that the plan to use Pence as a way to deny the certification was on shaky legal ground and could lead to major problems including standing in the way of the peaceful transfer of power.  

One source described Trump’s effort as have door after door closed in his face, but instead of backing down he kept looking for new doors to open until he found an attorney who would open the door to making the legal challenge he wanted: John Eastman. 

Some context: In an email exchange between Eastman and Pence lawyer Greg Jacob, which came out in a court proceeding earlier this year, Eastman acknowledged there was no legal merit to Trump’s demands.

During the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, Jacob wrote: “Did you advise that President that in your professional judgment the Vice President DOES NOT have the power to decide things unilaterally?” to which Eastman responded, “He’s been so advised, as you know because you were on the phone when I did it. I should not discuss other convos … BUt you know him — once he get something in his head it it hard to get him to change course”.

Today’s hearing is expected to highlight the legal exposure that Trump attorney John Eastman faces because of his role trying to advance last-minute bogus theories to claim that then Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally throw out some of the election results to keep Donald Trump in power. 

One reason the committee has some of Eastman’s emails that normally would be shielded by attorney client privilege is a ruling in March by a respected federal judge who declared that they were likely evidence of a crime, trying to impede Congress from certifying the election.

That ruling raised the stakes for Eastman and others, including the former president, and could be a preview of a decision the Justice Department will have to make about pursuing this as a possible crime.

Federal Judge David O Carter wrote that Eastman’s emails showed that the campaign to pressure Pence was “a coup in search of a legal theory.”

The House select committee has video testimony of rioters who went inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and who directed their anger at Pence — and believed they were acting at Donald Trump’s direction, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The goal is to tie Trump’s pressure campaign on Pence directly to the violence on Jan. 6 — and show how Trump incited the mob’s anger towards the vice president. The source added that while former Pence chief Marc Short will not be a live witness, his video testimony will feature prominently.

More context: These rioters — who said they believed they were following Trump’s orders — have been seen in court cases since Jan. 6th, 2021. This is perhaps the most notable example.

Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the Jan. 6 committee, told reporters the committee will be inviting the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas, to come talk to the committee “soon” in light of new emails that show she was communicating with conservative lawyer John Eastman.

“It’s time for us to invite her to come talk,” Thompson said of Thomas.

When asked when, Thompson said “soon.”

“We think it’s time that we would, at some point, invite her to come talk to the committee,” Thompson added.

Asked if Thomas will come up in the committee’s hearing, Thompson said, “at some point, but we’re still in the discovery phase.”

CNN has reached out to the committee. 

The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol teased their upcoming hearing on Thursday, by releasing a video clip from their deposition of former Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann.

In the clip, Herschmann outlines how he warned conservative attorney John Eastman to back off plans to file appeals in Georgia based on the election results after the events of January 6, 2021.

Thursday’s hearing is expected to focus on the pressure campaign applied to former Vice President Mike Pence to stand in the way of the certification of the election. Eastman was the architect of the plan, and the committee plans to show that he pushed it to former President Donald Trump despite the insistence from his top lawyers that it was not sound legal advice.

“He started to ask me about something dealing with Georgia and preserving something, potentially, for appeal,” Herschmann says in the video. “And I said to him, ‘Are you out of your effing mind? Because I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth for now on: orderly transition.’ I said ‘I don’t want to hear any other effing words coming out of your mouth no matter what, other than ‘orderly transition.’ Repeat those words to me.”

He then goes on to warn Eastman that his actions could potentially be against the law.

“Eventually he said ‘orderly transition.’ I said, ‘Good John. Now I’m gonna give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.’ And I hung up on him.

The committee is in the middle of a series of public hearings, which started last week, to showcase the panel’s findings since forming last year. On Monday, the committee heard testimony from a former Fox News digital politics editor, a conservative lawyer, a former US attorney and a former Republican election official — who all said it was clear President Joe Biden won the election and Trump’s claims of fraud were nonsense.

The committee was originally scheduled to hold a hearing on Wednesday, but that has been postponed until a later date. Members cited “technical issues” as well as giving Americans “the time and space to digest” the previous hearing as the reasons for the delay.

Members of the House select committee have been investigating what happened before, after and during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — and now they are presenting what they discovered to the public.

The committee is holding another hearing Thursday as it continues to roll out preliminary findings from its investigation in a series of presentations this month.

The committee is made up of 7 Democrats and 2 Republicans. It was formed after efforts to create an independent 9/11-style commission failed.

Rep. Liz Cheney is one of two Republicans on the panel appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pulled all five of his selections because Pelosi would not accept two of his picks. In July 2021, Pelosi invited GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to join the committee, making him the second GOP lawmaker to sit on the panel.

Here’s who is on the panel — and key things to know about them:

Democrats:

Republicans

A lawyer for one of the Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy released a 9-page document on Wednesday that outlines a plan to occupy key congressional buildings connected to the US Capitol and the Supreme Court on January 6, 2021, and to distribute a list of demands calling for a new election.

The plan envisioned using “covert sleeper(s)” to set up fake appointments in federal buildings and then having people “rush the building.” It claimed: “We have the ability to … Target Specific Senators Offices.”

The plan also included handing out flyers to demand “a new election” on January 20, 2021, and to warn prominent Republicans including then-Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Mitch McConnell that, “We the people are watching you.”

Details of the document had been previously disclosed in court. But the full document, titled “1776 Returns,” has now been filed as part of a seditious conspiracy case against members of the Proud Boys, including the group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio. Prosecutors say Tarrio got a copy of the document before January 6.

There is no specific reference to storming the US Capitol or to attacking police officers in the document.

The document has previously been cited by the Justice Department as well as the House select committee to show how extremist organizations such as the Proud Boys were considering storming government buildings as early as December 2020. Video from the riot shows members of the Proud Boys among the first to breach Capitol grounds.

You can read more about the nine-page plan here.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday that he plans to watch all of the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings and that prosecutors handling criminal cases stemming from the insurrection are also watching.

“I am watching, and I will be watching all the hearings, although I may not be able to watch all of it live,” Garland said. “But I will be sure that I am watching all of it. And I can assure you that the January 6 prosecutors are watching all of the hearings as well.”

The attorney general, who has faced mounting pressure from Democrats to pursue a criminal case against Trump and his allies related to the January 6 attack, declined to comment on new evidence provided by the committee.

He pointed to long-standing Justice Department operating procedure of not commenting on ongoing investigations, saying: “We do that both for the viability of our investigations and because it’s the right thing to do with respect to the civil liberties of people under investigation.”

Two dozen leading Democrats previously told CNN that Garland may have missed his moment to bring criminal charges against top Trump administration officials before the effort would get caught up in the 2024 presidential campaign jockeying set to begin later this year, after the midterm elections.

The Justice Department has arrested over 840 individuals, charging roughly 255 with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers that day – 90 of whom are charged with using a weapon or causing serious injury to an officer. 

Roughly 185 Capitol rioters have been sentenced so far, with over 80 receiving jail time.   

But the investigation is nowhere close to being over. The Justice Department is still looking for over 350 individuals who they say, “committed violent acts on Capitol grounds.”  

Read more about Garland and the Department of Justice investigation here.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol detailed Monday how those around then-President Donald Trump told him he lost the 2020 election — but he refused to listen, turning instead to his attorney Rudy Giuliani to embrace false claims that the election was stolen.

The panel heard testimony from a former Fox News digital politics editor, a conservative lawyer, a former US attorney and a former Republican election official — who all said it was clear President Joe Biden won the election and Trump’s claims of fraud were nonsense.

The committee says it will continue to present evidence that relates to Trump’s role in the insurrection at the next hearing on Thursday.

Here are the key takeaways from the panel’s second hearing this month to get up to speed:

Read more about the key takeaways here.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot has released footage that shows one of the people to whom GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia gave a tour on Jan. 5 was outside the building during the insurrection screaming threats about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The video, portions of which were released by the committee on Wednesday, appears to show a man taking photos of tunnels, hallways and staircases within the Capitol complex while on a tour led by Loudermilk. The committee also released footage that appears to show that same man marching to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The committee has not identified the man, but sources say the committee has interviewed him. The committee has also not provided evidence that the man in the video entered the Capitol on January 6.

The video released by the committee seems to challenge the findings of US Capitol Police as detailed in a letter sent to Republican lawmakers this week, which said the department conducted a review of security footage from January 5 and did not observe any activities it deemed to be suspicious or consistent with a reconnaissance tour.

Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger said the video shows Loudermilk “with a group of approximately 12 people which later grew to 15 people” walking through the Capitol office buildings on January 5. Manger also states that the group of visitors did not “appear in any tunnels that would lead them to the US Capitol.”

“On May 19, 2022, the Select Committee invited you to meet with us about evidence of a tour you provided on January 5, 2021. Based on our review of surveillance video, social media activity, and witness accounts, we understand you led a tour group through parts of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021. That group stayed for several hours, despite the complex being closed to the public on that day,” the committee’s chairman, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said Wednesday in a new letter to Loudermilk.

“Surveillance footage shows a tour of approximately ten individuals led by you to areas in the Rayburn, Longworth, and Cannon House Office Buildings, as well as the entrances to tunnels leading to the U.S. Capitol,” he added. “Individuals on the tour photographed and recorded areas of the complex not typically of interest to tourists, including hallways, staircases, and security checkpoints.”

Loudermilk said in a statement to CNN after the video’s release Wednesday, that “the Capitol Police already put this false accusation to bed, yet the Committee is undermining the Capitol Police and doubling down on their smear campaign, releasing so-called evidence of a tour of the House Office Buildings, which I have already publicly addressed.”

You can read more about the footage here.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of the House Select Committee said the Capitol Hill investigation into Jan. 6 is getting “new evidence” daily, and some of that will be presented at Thursday’s public hearing.

He didn’t provide specifics.

“New evidence is breaking every single day now. Suddenly a lot of people want to tell the truth and try to distance themselves from this outrageous plan to subvert and overthrow the 2020 presidential election. And I do think there are more particles of evidence emerging about just that,” Raskin said on CNN Thursday morning. 

“We’re having to integrate everything into our presentation of the evidence. … You’ll be able to see both today and in the hearings to come that we have fresh evidence of what was taking place, which was a plan to overthrow and put down the 2020 election,” Raskin said.

Raskin also said a future hearing would describe a so-called “back channel” between domestic extremist groups, such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, with the Trump world. 

Again, he did not share specifics of what the committee has learned. 

“The hearing I’m working on is about the relationship between this whole effort and the domestic violent extremist groups and how the mob was actually mobilized and put into action,” Raskin said.

CNN has previously reported on some connections the Justice Department has established already between leaders of the group and some contacts of Trump.

Throughout the 2020 campaign, former President Trump repeatedly lied about rampant voter fraud and claimed that the election would be “rigged” against him. He escalated this rhetoric after Election Day by falsely claiming victory, and continued pushing these lies after Biden became the projected President-elect.  

Trump’s campaign and his allies then filed dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits across the country, seeking to overturn the results, based on spurious fraud claims. Despite losing those lawsuits, Trump continued promoting these lies while pressuring federal, state, and local officials to help him stop the transition of power. These officials largely refused to help Trump with his plan.  

Trump repeated these lies during his Ellipse rally on Jan. 6, which helped spur the Capitol riot. Trump’s rhetoric inspired the vast majority of Republicans to believe that Biden did not win the 2020 election, according to CNN polling. Many of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol also expressed this view. 

The Jan. 6 committee has released testimony from Trump advisers revealing that he was told shortly after the election that he lost – but he kept pushing ahead with disinformation and false claims about the election. Some academics and historians have dubbed this phenomenon as “the Big Lie.” 

The House Jan. 6 committee will use its third June hearing to make the case that then-President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on his vice president to overturn the 2020 presidential election “directly contributed” to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, which put Mike Pence’s life in danger, aides said on Wednesday.

Committee aides said Thursday’s hearing will focus on how Trump had driven the pressure campaign against Pence despite being told by lawyers in the White House counsel’s office that the vice president did not have the authority to unilaterally subvert the election results.

The committee plans to move from the origination of the theory put forward by Trump attorney John Eastman that Pence had the authority to overturn the election results through Trump’s weeks-long pressure campaign that led to the insurrection.

Aides said that the hearing would include new materials about what Pence was doing on Jan. 6, including his whereabouts.

Committee aides said they also intend to demonstrate at the hearing that there’s an “ongoing threat” to democracy from people advocating the false view that the 2020 election was rigged.

Greg Jacob, who served as counsel to Pence when he was vice president, and J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge and informal Pence adviser, will testify before the committee on Thursday. While former Pence chief of staff Marc Short is not testifying Thursday, aides said that his deposition testimony is expected to be shown.

Much of Thursday’s presentation will be led by Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar of California. A committee counsel also will be asking questions during Thursday’s hearing.

Committee aides said the panel once again planned to weave live witness testimony with depositions the panel has on video. On Tuesday, the committee teased video from former Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann saying that he had told Eastman on January 7 that he should “get a great effing criminal defense attorney.”

The chairman of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol told reporters Monday that the panel will not make any criminal referral of former President Donald Trump or anyone else to the Justice Department – a claim that met swift pushback from members of the panel.

“No, you know, we’re going to tell the facts. If the Department of Justice looks at it, and assume that there’s something that needs further review, I’m sure they’ll do it,” Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson said when asked whether the committee would refer Trump or others to the department.

Pressed again on whether the committee would ever make a formal referral to the Justice Department, the Mississippi Democrat said, “No, that’s not our job. Our job is to look at the facts and circumstances around January 6, what caused it and make recommendations after that.”

While Thompson drew the distinct line, his statement drew quick reactions from members of the committee, revealing the panel is split over how to handle a potential referral of the former President and his associates for prosecution. The committee this month is holding a series of hearings that are designed to show Trump was at the center of a conspiracy to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election results and the peaceful transfer of power.

Rep. Liz Cheney, who serves as vice chair of the committee, released a statement contradicting the chairman’s comments. “The January 6th Select Committee has not issued a conclusion regarding potential criminal referrals. We will announce a decision on that at an appropriate time,” the Wyoming Republican tweeted.

The comment marked a rare public break between the two leaders of the committee.

A spokesperson for the committee told CNN in a statement that “the Select Committee has no authority to prosecute individuals, but is rather tasked with developing the facts surrounding the January 6th riot at the Capitol. Right now, the committee is focused on presenting our findings to the American people in our hearings and in our report. Our investigation is ongoing and we will continue to gather all relevant information as we present facts, offer recommendations and, if warranted, make criminal referrals.”

Keep reading here.

The third Jan. 6 hearing is about to start. So far, we’ve heard compelling testimony and seen gripping video during the first two days of the House select committee’s hearings.

Here are some of the most important things to refresh on before things get underway.

Former President Trump didn’t want the Capitol riot to stop

During the first hearing last week, the committee revealed testimony from Trump White House officials who said the former President did not want the US Capitol attack to stop, angrily resisted his own advisers who were urging him to call off the rioters and thought his own vice president “deserved” to be hanged.

It offered a new window into Trump’s demeanor during the riot – something the committee has repeatedly suggested would be a key part of their public hearings.

Vice chair Liz Cheney described testimony from a witness who said Trump was aware of chants to “Hang Mike Pence” and seemed to approve of them.

“Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the President responded with this sentiment: [quote] ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence [quote] ‘deserves’ it,” she said.

Cheney has previously characterized Trump’s inaction on January 6 during those 187 minutes as a “dereliction of duty.”

Trump’s team and family turn against him

The committee’s first hearing was bolstered with never-before-seen video clips showing members of Trump’s White House and campaign – as well as his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner – speaking about how they didn’t believe Trump’s claims that the election was stolen.

Former Attorney General William Barr said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were “bullshit.”

Ivanka Trump said that she respected Barr and “accepted what he was saying” about the election.

Trump spokesman Jason Miller said the campaign data person told Trump in “pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.”

And the committee cited testimony from Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon, who testified he told Meadows by “mid-to-late November” that the campaign had come up empty trying to find widespread fraud in key states that Trump lost. Cannon said Meadows responded to his assessment by saying, “So there’s no there there.”

Bill Barr becomes debunker-in-chief

Democrats reviled Barr when he was in office — accusing him of wielding the powers of the Justice Department to do Trump’s bidding, undermining the Russia investigation, and pushing right-wing conspiracy theories. But over the last two weeks, Barr has become a new hero of sorts for liberals, for aggressively debunking and condemning Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

The Democratic-run committee has featured clips from Barr’s deposition more than any other witness so far, and they interviewed more than 1,000 people as part of their yearlong investigation. These clips have established Barr as the highest-ranking Trump administration official to affirm the legitimacy of the election results and disavow Trump’s relentless effort to claim that the election was tainted by fraud.

During Monday’s hearing, Barr dismantled specific Trump-backed claims about illegal “vote dumps” in Detroit, nationwide vote-rigging by Dominion with its election machines, and other conspiracy theories.

Unprompted, Barr even went out of his way to criticize “2,000 Mules,” the film created by right-wing activist Dinesh D’Souza, a convicted felon who claims that the 2020 election was stolen. (In a deposition clip played Monday, Barr laughed off the film and said it was “completely lacking” in evidence.)

Barr said the theories Trump supported were “idiotic” and “amateurish” and “detached from reality.” This rhetoric is strikingly close to what top Democrats have said all along about Trump’s fraud claims.

To be clear, Barr is still a hardline conservative. Just a few weeks ago, he made several false claims in a Fox News interview about the Trump-Russia investigation, and backed up Trump’s baseless assertions that the entire probe was a fabricated “hoax” perpetrated by Democratic operatives and the FBI.

Committee argues Trump peddled fraud claims in bad faith after he was personally told were not legitimate

One of the primary areas of focus of Monday’s hearing was to underscore the idea that Trump and some of his allies continued to peddle false claims of election fraud after they were personally told those claims were not legitimate.

The committee made the argument that Trump was repeatedly told by his own top officials, including Barr and ex-Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, that the myriad of fraud claims he was pushing were groundless and were certainly not evidence that the election was stolen.

“I specifically raised the Dominion voting machines, which I found to be among the most disturbing allegations – disturbing in the sense that I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public,” Barr said during his deposition, according to a video played Monday.

Yet, Trump and some of his allies continued to push these false claims all the way through January in what the committee attempted to show was a bad faith effort to overturn the election despite consistently being told those claims were not valid.

During their December 2020 Oval Office confrontation, Barr said that Trump gave him a report that claimed “absolute proof” the Dominion voting machines had been rigged. Barr said that the report “looked very amateurish to me,” and he “didn’t see any supporting information” for the fraud claims.

Barr would resign in December 2020 shortly after his last meeting with Trump and was replaced by acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who also faced a similar barrage of pressure from the former President to investigate the same unfounded election fraud claims that Barr had warned him were baseless.

Ultimately, Trump considered replacing Rosen with a relatively obscure environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, who had demonstrated a willingness to pursue the fraud claims that other senior DOJ officials would not.

Clark drafted a “Proof of Concept memo” for overturning the 2020 election and sent it to top Justice Department officials on December 28, 2020, two weeks after Barr’s resignation. That memo relied heavily on many of the same debunked fraud claims that Trump had already been told had no merit.

At the same time, Trump’s allies were pushing the Justice Department to take Trump’s false stolen election claims to the Supreme Court in an effort to prevent the outcome from several key swing states from being counted. The brief sent to Rosen and other top DOJ officials by Trump’s personal assistant at the White House cited the same report on Michigan voting machine irregularities Barr had told Trump was “amateurish” and failed to include any supporting information.

Committee reveals details of investigation into campaign’s finances

One of the key details the January 6 committee revealed during Monday’s hearing was how Trump’s lies about the election turned into millions of dollars in fundraising for Trump’s campaign and the political action committee he created after the election.

The panel made the case that Trump’s false claims about voter fraud dovetailed with his campaign’s fundraising effort – resulting in $250 million being donated to Trump and his allies, including solicited requests for an “official election defense fund,” that did not exist.

During the committee’s investigation, went to court to try to pry loose financial documents like bank records that were connected to January 6. Monday’s hearing was the first indication of how the panel plans to use those records in its hearings.

Still, the committee didn’t show a ton of detail about what financial documents it had obtained, and more could be unveiled in the hearings to come.

The House select committee investigating Jan. 6 has formally announced that two former advisers to former Vice President Mike Pence will appear as witnesses during Thursday’s public hearing.

Greg Jacob, who served as counsel to Pence when he was vice president, and J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge and informal Pence adviser, will appear before the committee, the panel said Wednesday.

CNN previously reported that both Jacob and Luttig, who have been interviewed by the committee behind closed doors, were expected to testify publicly.

The hearing itself is expected to focus on former President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful pressure campaign to get Pence to help overturn the election by stopping the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.