Pence, Mike

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      Pence Navigates a Possible White House Run, and a Fraught Political Moment

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      In a speech on Monday, former Vice President Mike Pence sounded like a future presidential candidate, but not like someone interested in discussing the specifics of Jan. 6.Former Vice President Mike Pence has emerged from the Jan. 6 hearings in a peculiar position.To some Democrats in Congress, he has become something of a hero for resisting Donald J. Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election at a time when American democracy seemed to teeter on the brink. To Mr. Trump and his political base, Mr. Pence is a weakling who gave away the presidency. And to a swath of anti-Trump voters in both parties, he is merely someone who finally did the right thing by standing up to his former boss — years too late, after willingly defending or ignoring some of Mr. Trump’s earlier excesses.The whipsaw of images creates an uncertain foundation for a potential presidential campaign, for which Mr. Pence has been laying the groundwork. Yet the former vice president is continuing with his travels around the country in advance of the 2024 primaries, as he navigates his fraught positioning.Much as he did after the 2020 election, when he tried to keep his tensions with Mr. Trump from becoming public only to have him push them into the light, Mr. Pence continues to walk a tightrope, trying to make the best of a situation he didn’t seek without becoming openly adversarial to the president with whom he served and who remains the leader of the Republican Party.Mr. Pence himself has said little about Jan. 6, though his aides have testified about his resolve as Mr. Trump and his allies tried to press him to subvert President Biden’s victory. On Monday, in an economic speech at the University Club of Chicago, Mr. Pence sounded very much like a candidate — but not much like someone interested in discussing the specifics of what he lived through on Jan. 6.“We’ve all been through a lot over the last several years,” Mr. Pence told the audience. “A global pandemic, social unrest, a divisive election, a tragic day in our nation’s capital — and an administration seemingly every day driving our economy into the abyss of a socialist welfare state.” Insights into Mr. Pence’s mind-set at the time have come largely from the testimony of his former chief of staff, Marc Short, and of his former counsel, Greg Jacob. Mr. Pence, as he made clear in his Chicago speech, has kept his sights trained on the Biden administration and on electing Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and others who were sharply at odds with Mr. Trump, in the midterms. If Mr. Pence has sharper things to say, he may not do so until the fall, when he has a book coming out.Former Vice President Mike Pence at a campaign event for Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia in Kennesaw, Ga., in May.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“The situation Mike Pence faces is a political briar patch,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist who worked on Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign in 2016. “The more he’s praised by Democrats and the media for doing the right thing on Jan. 6, the more some in Trump’s base grow skeptical of his loyalty to the Trump team.” He added, “There is no upside for him to lean into any of this.”Later on Monday in Peoria, Ill., Mr. Pence called on Republicans to focus on the future and not the 2020 presidential election, an indirect reference to Mr. Trump’s incessant focus on his election loss that continues to this day. “In the days between now and Election Day, let’s cast a positive vision for the future for the American people,” Mr. Pence told a crowd of Republican activists at a Lincoln Day dinner. “Yes, let’s be the loyal opposition. Let’s hold the other side accountable every single day. In the days between now and Election Day, we need you to say yes — yes to the future, yes to a future of freedom and our cherished values. And the Republican Party must be the party of the future.”The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.Three times Mr. Pence lauded accomplishments of “the Trump-Pence administration” and he related a story from his high school reunion about a former classmate who encouraged him by telling him, “We need you guys back.”During the speech, Kathy Sparrow, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Hancock County, Ill., shouted “Pence for president!” Mr. Pence ignored the shout. “Trump had his turn,” Ms. Sparrow said after Mr. Pence’s remarks. “It’s time for Pence to step up and run.” The attention on Mr. Pence provides both potential benefit and peril as he considers running for president.Paeans from Democrats certainly do not help him, but his actions before, during and after Jan. 6 give him an opportunity to differentiate himself in what could be a crowded primary field, one that may include Mr. Trump. Mr. Pence, whose support for Mr. Trump helped allay concerns about him from evangelical voters in 2016, has the advantage of starting as a known entity to the Republican base.Mr. Pence has tried to stake out a lane for himself by representing the aspects of the Trump White House that appealed to conservatives but without the coarse and sometimes abusive behavior from Mr. Trump that they grew weary of. But this approach has been complicated by the fact that the loudest praise for Mr. Pence has come from Democrats who voted to impeach Mr. Trump.“In a time of absolutely scandalous betrayal of people’s oaths of office and crimes being committed all over the place, somebody who does their job and sticks to the law will stand out as a hero on that day,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “And on that day, he was a hero.”Many other Democrats, however, have resisted the idea that Mr. Pence — who is known as cautious and loyal, and who did not break with Mr. Trump until the very end — should be praised, particularly as he considers campaigning to be the next president.“Pence is currently on his own political rehab tour, hoping he can wash the stink of being Trump’s vice president off,” the Arizona Democratic Party said in a blast email when Mr. Pence made a trip to the southern border in that state recently. “But we know just because Mike Pence didn’t give in on January 6 doesn’t change the fact he missed multiple opportunities to do the right thing for 4 whole years.”Other Democrats, including the members of the Democratic National Committee, have highlighted that Mr. Pence adhered closely to Mr. Trump without wavering during some of the biggest controversies of his presidency, including his first impeachment, and that Mr. Pence did not speak publicly about his views until moments before the election certification began on Jan. 6.Nonetheless, even some of the harshest critics of the Trump era have said that the actions of Jan. 6 should not be treated lightly.Vice President Mike Pence with President Donald J. Trump at the White House three weeks after Election Day in 2020.Erin Schaff/The New York Times“It’s true that for months before the election and weeks after, Mike Pence played along with Trump’s baseless election conspiracies,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to former President Barack Obama. “He certainly didn’t dissent. But, at the end of the day, he’ll be remembered for one critical moment when he resisted enormous pressure and literally put his life on the line for our democracy. And, for that, he deserves all the accolades he’s received.”The complaints from Democrats have focused not just on his tolerance for Mr. Trump’s norm-shattering behavior but also for the administration’s policies. Mr. Pence’s aides say he believed the administration was enacting policies he generally agreed with, including putting forward conservative nominees for three Supreme Court seats. His long loyalty to Mr. Trump could resonate with some Republicans, but, with the former president demanding total fealty, it is a difficult line to walk.“The irony is that Pence was arguably the primary enabler of Trump,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist based in California. “He was the mainstream traditional conservative Republican who would go to donors and not just defend Trump and his policies, but with a straight face insist that Donald J. Trump was a good man.”Mr. Short, Mr. Pence’s former chief of staff, has been critical of aspects of the House committee’s work, at a time when Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to view the panel as illegitimate. That has allowed Mr. Pence to keep some distance from the work of the committee, which he has not appeared before himself.Officials are expected to try again to ask Mr. Pence to testify, a move he will most likely resist. On Sunday, Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and a committee member, left open the idea that requesting his presence may still happen.“Certainly a possibility,” Mr. Schiff said. “We’re not excluding anyone or anything at this point.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Mike Pence Was of Two Minds

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      Gail Collins: Bret, I never did like Mike Pence at all — his far-right social values would have turned me off even if he didn’t call his wife “Mother.”Bret Stephens: Well, it beats “Cousin.” Sorry, continue.Gail: And I’ve never forgotten the moment when Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” asked Pence if he ever thought he’d be able to tell Donald Trump he needed to apologize for having “crossed the line.” Pence just kinda babbled without answering until Trump interrupted. “Absolutely. I might not apologize,” Trump said. “But I would absolutely want him to come in.”But now, the worm has turned! Except I guess I shouldn’t be calling Pence a worm any more.Bret: I’m having a hard time joining the “Mike Pence the Hero” bandwagon that some of my old friends on the right have jumped aboard.Where was Pence in November when Trump started lying about the election the moment their defeat became clear? Where was he when the president enlisted the likes of Sidney Powell and John Eastman to peddle insane conspiracy theories about voting machines and preposterous interpretations of the Electoral Count Act? Where was he on invoking the 25th Amendment after the assault on the Capitol, or at least on supporting impeachment? Pence was a worm who, for a few hours on Jan. 6, turned into a glowworm.Gail: OK, I can’t top that.Still, I keep imagining what chaos the country would have fallen into if Pence had panicked and refused to count the election results back to the states instead of just certifying Joe Biden as president.Bret: Nancy Pelosi would have beaten him to a pulp with that giant gavel of hers before he could have done it.Gail: That’s an image I plan to carry around with me for a long time.Bret: Also, can I fume a bit about the so-called sane right’s position on all this? They’re busy trying to switch the subject to left-wing rioting, as if trashing a courthouse in Portland, bad as that is, is somehow an equivalent event to a sitting president inciting a violent mob to trash the Capitol in order to overturn a national election.Gail: Feel free to fume for both of us.Bret: OK, end of rant. What conclusions do you draw from the Jan. 6 committee hearings?Gail: Well, we certainly were reminded that Trump was totally complicit in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.Bret: Not complicit. Guilty.Gail: Yeah, thanks for the better word. And apparently when he insisted he won the election he was ignoring virtually everybody giving him advice except Rudy Giuliani.Wow, just imagine a defiant Trump telling his expert counselors: “That might be all your opinion — but Rudy was making some very good points before he passed out over there.”Bret: Some of our younger readers may not remember that Giuliani was Time’s Person of the Year in 2001 for his leadership after the attacks of Sept. 11. His fall from grace has been like a bungee jump minus the bungee.Gail: Giuliani’s role during Sept. 11 was … not what you imagine. He wouldn’t, for instance, have been dramatically marching around the streets after the attack if he hadn’t moved the critically important emergency command center into the World Trade Center, a well-identified terrorist target, because he wanted it within walking distance of his office.Could go on, but for me Rudy’s fall from heroic grace goes back a trillion years.Bret: I’m beginning to think you’re right. Never did like the way he went after Michael Milken.Gail: As for Trump, even if nothing we learned at the hearings has been a big surprise, it’s so, so very important to get all this stuff on the record in as public and evenhanded a way as possible.And again, I’ve gotta say: Good work, Mike Pence. You’re a terrible person, but you had a moment. If the vice president had panicked and gone to hide in a relative’s basement when it was time to certify the election, can’t imagine where we’d be now.Bret: Pass the peyote. Gail Collins has a better impression of Mike Pence than I do.Gail: Well, I’m giving him one good day.And what’s your prediction for what happens next to Trump? Presidential election bid in 2024 or the slammer?Bret: In a just world? I’d want one jury to indict him, another to convict him and a warden to lock him up — to borrow a phrase.What I don’t know is whether that’s the smart thing to do. On one hand, prosecuting him would be a good reminder that we’re a nation of laws. On the other, it would radicalize the right even further, turn him into a national martyr to about a third of the country if he goes to prison and make him a clear and present danger to everyone else if he doesn’t. And it would be the only thing the country could talk about for years while we have a few other problems to deal with.What say you?Gail: Prosecuting Trump would be righteous, but you’re right — it would leave him subject of still more right-wing hero-worship. My real dream is to see him go completely bankrupt.Bret: Once again.Gail: Permanently this time. First we have to get past 2024 and any chance he returns to the presidency, God help us. Then all the civil lawsuits and public investigations into his business dealings in New York come to fruition — and then he’s down to a basement apartment in Staten Island.Bret: Even Staten Island doesn’t deserve that. But I doubt Trump will be convicted or fined for all of his dodgy business deals. His crime is treason, in the Constitution’s precise definition: levying war against the United States or adhering to its enemies and giving them aid and comfort.Gail: I agree about what he deserves, but I’m still worried the long and unprecedented attempt to send him to jail would fail while splitting the country way more.And I’d love to dwell on my vision of Trump holding out an empty coffee cup on some corner, begging for change. Maybe not realistic, but so … sweet.Now we ought to talk some about Biden and the state of the economy. Feel free to vent.Bret: Many of our readers have fond feelings toward Jimmy Carter as a person, but the Biden administration increasingly feels like a rerun of the Carter years, complete with stagflation, an energy crisis and Moscow invading a neighboring country. The smartest thing Biden can do, politically and economically, is to stop blaming others — even genuine villains like Vladimir Putin — so that his administration doesn’t project an air of being at the mercy of events.Gail: Go on …Bret: As I was saying last week, he should fire Janet Yellen, preferably this week, and replace her with Larry Summers. It will create a sense of accountability and put energy in the executive, as Alexander Hamilton might have said. Work with Canada to import more oil, whether by rail or pipeline or truck: It beats getting our oil from Venezuela. Give Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo or the infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu the job of anticipating and preventing consumer-goods shortages, from baby formula to tampons to whatever is next.If all this sounds extreme, consider what will happen if we just drift along until President DeSantis takes the reins in 2025. Or President Trump. But I’m always happy to hear of a better way.Gail: I don’t blame Yellen for our economic mess, although I’d sadly sacrifice her if it would move us forward. Your other ideas don’t sound extremely extreme — although if we’re going to start piping oil from Canada the plan needs to be married to the battle against global warming.Bret: Step One: Subsidize an accelerated transition to a hybrid- and electric-car vehicle fleet. Step Two: Build safer next-generation nuclear reactors to power more of the grid. Step Three: Blame Canada for any and all remaining issues.Gail: Well, giving you half a step for the electric cars.Back to the economy: If Biden had any prayer of getting Congressional support, I’d want him to return to his early-administration dreams. Invest in quality child care options to bring women back into the work force and reduce the labor shortage. Give lower- and middle-income workers a jolt of extra cash through tax rebates. Install his program to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. In a perfect world, fund a federal program to cut back on student debt.Bret: Nice to be reminded that in some post-Trump universe, there’s a lot we still disagree about.Gail: Of course, all this would cost money, and that’s why we’d need — yes! — tax hikes on the rich. Many of whom are making out like bandits in the current economy.Bret: Let’s fight about that later. In the meantime, our readers shouldn’t miss our former opinion-page colleague Clay Risen’s wonderful “Overlooked No More” obituary for William B. Gould, who in 1862 escaped slavery in North Carolina by commandeering a sailboat, joined the crew of a Union blockade ship, kept a meticulous diary, went on to prosperity in Massachusetts and lived to be 85. Next year Dedham, Mass., will unveil a statue in his honor on the centenary of his death. A great reminder of all that’s worth celebrating this Juneteenth.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Hence, Mike Pence

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      WASHINGTON — The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.At first, you think that fawning over the boss is a good way to move forward. But when you are dealing with a narcissist — and narcissists are the ones who like to be surrounded by sycophants — you can never be unctuous enough.Narcissists are Grand Canyons of need. The more they are flattered, the more their appetite for flattery grows.That is the hard, almost fatal, lesson Pence learned on Jan. 6, when he finally stood up to Donald Trump after Trump asked for one teensy favor: Help destroy American democracy and all we stand for.Two new photos shown at a hearing of the House committee investigating Jan. 6 tell a shocking story — one of the most incredible in our nation’s history.In one, Karen Pence is protectively pulling a gold-fringed curtain shut in the vice president’s ceremonial office in the Capitol, off the Senate floor, as Pence — sitting beneath a large gilt mirror — stares off into space, probably wondering where it all went wrong.Mike Pence in his office in the Capitol on Jan. 6, as his wife, Karen, closes the curtains to keep the rioters from looking in. The Pences, including his brother Greg and his daughter Charlotte, awaited the securing of the building.White HouseWe learned this week that when the vice president fled down the stairs, followed by an Air Force officer carrying the nuclear launch codes, the marauding mob was a few feet from him.In a second picture, taken after Pence was brought to a secure location in an underground garage, his daughter Charlotte is anxiously watching him. He is holding a phone to his ear as he stares at another phone showing a video of Trump professing love for the crowd, which included some who carried baseball bats and zip ties and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”In the early afternoon, as the crowd tore down barricades and fought police, White House staffers worried things were “getting out of hand,” as Sarah Matthews, a Trump aide, testified.They thought that the president needed to tweet something immediately. At 2:24 p.m., they got a notification that the president had indeed tweeted. But it was not the calming tweet they had hoped for; it was one designed to drive the rioters into a frenzy.“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump tweeted. “USA demands the truth!”As Matthews recalled in her deposition, “The situation was already bad, and so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.”Trump was still steaming from the contentious morning phone call when he failed to persuade the vice president to reject some of the states’ electors so they could be replaced with fake electors who supported Trump. He had railed at Pence with emasculating epithets.As Trump recalled in a speech on Friday in Nashville, “I said to Mike, ‘If you do this, you can be Thomas Jefferson.’ And then, after it all went down, I looked at him one day and said, ‘I hate to say this, but you’re no Thomas Jefferson.’”In the same speech, Trump had another line that was strikingly delusional, even for him. “For the radical left,” he said, “politics has become their religion. It has warped their sense of right and wrong. They don’t have a sense of right and wrong, true and false, good and evil.”Trump sparked the mob to seek vengeance against Pence the same way Henry II sparked a crew to murder Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. According to legend, after Becket defied Henry by excommunicating bishops supportive of the king, Henry muttered something to the effect of, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Four knights immediately rode to Canterbury Cathedral and sliced up Becket.The line became a famous example of directing loyalists with indirection, cloaking an order as a wish. Who will rid me of this meddlesome vice president?A Times video, showing how the Proud Boys breached the Capitol, underscored that within the confederacy of dunces, there was an actual organized conspiracy. The group began plotting even before the election to take up arms for Trump. When Trump barked “Stand back and stand by” about the Proud Boys during his debate with Joe Biden, the Proud Boys felt as though they had received a directive, like Henry’s knights.With each hearing, it becomes clearer that Trump has no plausible deniability. He put the lives of the vice president and his family at risk, as well as the lives of lawmakers, by sending a crowd, stewing in lies, into a frenzy.Pence did not have the power to do what Trump wanted, and it’s good that he resisted the insane, illegal and unconstitutional plan of the narcissist in the Oval. But Pence still wants it both ways. He has steered clear of the committee. He wants to become president by staying on the good side of Trump supporters, but they’re never going to forgive him.At the end of the day of infamy, John Eastman, the nutty lawyer trying to help Trump overturn the election, sent an email imploring Pence to adjourn the congressional certification so sympathetic state legislators could help with Trump’s fairy tale of a rigged election.When Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel, showed the email to the vice president, Pence said, “That’s rubber room stuff.”The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Attacks Mike Pence for Not Rejecting Electoral Votes in 2020

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      In a speech, Donald J. Trump was undeterred by the Jan. 6 House committee’s account of how his rioting supporters menaced the vice president, and the panel’s dismantling of many of his election lies.A day after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault illustrated the serious danger that rioters posed to Mike Pence, former President Donald J. Trump unleashed a new attack on the man who had served him as vice president, criticizing him for refusing to interfere with the Electoral College certification of the 2020 presidential contest.Speaking on Friday afternoon before a faith-based group, Mr. Trump said that “Mike did not have the courage to act” in trying to unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes that were being cast for Joseph R. Biden Jr.On Thursday, the House panel demonstrated that Mr. Trump and his advisers were told repeatedly that Mr. Pence had no power to block the certification and that doing so would violate the law, but pressed him to try anyway.The committee also used witnesses to dismantle and debunk Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud — arguments that he repeated in his keynote speech on Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville.Mr. Trump has grown angry watching the hearings, knowing that he lacks a bully pulpit from which to respond, according to his advisers. He used much of his Friday address to repeat his false election claims and to denigrate Mr. Pence.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.Most striking was the context for the attack on Mr. Pence, whose presence on the presidential ticket in 2016 was critical to reassuring evangelical voters that Mr. Trump, a thrice-married New York real estate developer whose first divorce was tabloid fodder for months and who had supported abortion rights, had become sufficiently conservative on social issues.Mr. Pence, who often talks about his religious faith, is a favorite among the kind of voters attending the conference. But that did not stop Mr. Trump from denouncing him from the stage on Friday.After repeating claims about election fraud that have been widely debunked, including by his former attorney general, William P. Barr, Mr. Trump turned his sights on Mr. Pence.First, he insisted that he had not called Mr. Pence a “wimp” in a phone call with the vice president on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, even though Mr. Trump’s former aide Nick Luna had testified under penalty of perjury about such a comment. “I don’t even know who these people are,” Mr. Trump told the crowd.“I never called Mike Pence a wimp,” said Mr. Trump, whose daughter Ivanka was present for the call and later told her chief of staff that Mr. Trump had effectively called Mr. Pence a coward, using a vulgarity. Then, Mr. Trump went on to describe Mr. Pence as weak.“Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be, frankly, historic,” the former president said. “But just like Bill Barr and the rest of these weak people,” he said, Mr. Pence “did not have the courage to act.” The comment was met with applause.Mr. Trump continued to mock Mr. Pence, whose aides testified that he had told Mr. Trump repeatedly that he did not have the power to dismiss Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory or declare a 10-day recess in the congressional session to send the votes back to states to be re-examined.“Mike Pence had absolutely no choice but to be a human conveyor belt,” Mr. Trump said.Mr. Trump also mischaracterized the 1801 certification of Thomas Jefferson’s presidential victory — a process that Jefferson, then the vice president, oversaw — to argue that Mr. Pence should have used that model to keep Mr. Trump in office.“I said to Mike, ‘If you do this, you can be Thomas Jefferson,’” Mr. Trump said. “And then after it all went down, I looked at him one day and I said, ‘Mike, I hate to say this, but you’re not Thomas Jefferson.’”Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s former chief of staff, said this conversation never happened. Mr. Short did not comment more broadly on Mr. Trump’s speech.Mr. Trump also complained that the House committee had edited videos of his former aides’ testimony so that they were not played in full context. He appeared to be referring indirectly to testimony by his daughter Ivanka, whose remarks have been used against her father in two hearings.Speaking of the mob that left his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 and swarmed the Capitol, Mr. Trump remained defensive. “It was a simple protest,” he said. “It got out of hand.” More

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      For Mike Pence, Jan. 6 Began Like Many Days. It Ended Like No Other.

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      An angry mob chanting “hang Mike Pence” came within 40 feet of the vice president. He spent nearly five hours in an underground loading dock. And the president called him a “wimp” and worse.Former Vice President Mike Pence spent almost five hours on Jan. 6 in a loading dock beneath the Capitol. At one point, an angry mob chanting “hang Mike Pence” came within 40 feet of him.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — He started the day with a prayer.Vice President Mike Pence, preparing to withstand the final stage of a relentless campaign by President Donald J. Trump to force him to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, began Jan. 6, 2021, surrounded by aides at his official residence at the Naval Observatory, asking God for guidance.The group was expecting a difficult day. But what followed over the next 12 hours was more harrowing than they imagined.An angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray chanting “hang Mike Pence” came within 40 feet of the vice president. Mr. Pence’s Secret Service detail had to hustle him to safety and hold him for nearly five hours in the bowels of the Capitol. Mr. Trump called Mr. Pence a “wimp” and worse in a coarse and abusive call that morning from the Oval Office, Mr. Trump’s daughter and former White House aides testified.And a confidential witness who traveled to Washington with the Proud Boys, the most prominent of the far-right groups that helped lead the assault on the Capitol, later told investigators the group would have killed Mr. Pence — and Speaker Nancy Pelosi — if they got the chance.Those were among the extraordinary new details that emerged during the third public hearing held Thursday by the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.Mr. Pence’s day dawned as it often did. The vice president, whose evangelical faith was a selling point for adding him to the presidential ticket in 2016 but often a source of skepticism for Mr. Trump, was joined by three people in prayer: his chief counsel, Greg Jacob; his chief of staff, Marc Short; and his director of legislative affairs, Chris Hodgson.Mr. Pence and the team had been subjected to a barrage of demands from Mr. Trump that the vice president refuse to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory in a joint session of Congress — an unconstitutional action never before taken in the two and a half centuries since the nation’s founding.“We just asked for guidance and wisdom, knowing the day was going to be a challenging one,” Mr. Short said in videotaped testimony played by the committee.While Mr. Pence was at the Naval Observatory, Mr. Trump was in the Oval Office with aides and family members trickling in and out, including Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Ivanka Trump. He had already sent two Twitter posts further pressuring Mr. Pence, the first at 1 a.m. The second, at 8 a.m., concluded, “Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”At 11:20 a.m., Mr. Trump called Mr. Pence, who stepped away from his aides to take the call.The group in the Oval Office could hear Mr. Trump’s side of the call but paid little attention to what seemed to start as a routine conversation. But as Mr. Trump became increasingly heated that Mr. Pence was holding firm in his refusal to give in, the call became hard to ignore.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.“I remember hearing the word ‘wimp,’” Nick Luna, an aide to Mr. Trump, said in videotaped testimony. “‘Wimp’ is the word I remember.”Ivanka Trump, the president’s older daughter and a former top White House adviser, said in her videotaped testimony that “it was a different tone than I heard him take with the vice president before.”Ms. Trump’s chief of staff, Julie Radford, appeared in videotaped testimony to say that Ms. Trump told her shortly after the call that Mr. Trump had an “upsetting” conversation with Mr. Pence. The president, Ms. Radford said, used “the P word.” (The New York Times reported previously that Mr. Trump had told Mr. Pence, “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy,” according to two people briefed on the conversation.)Over at the Naval Observatory, Mr. Pence returned to the room after taking the call looking “steely,” “determined” and “grim,” Mr. Jacob told the committee.Mr. Trump in the meantime revised a speech that he delivered later that day to throngs of supporters on the Ellipse. An early draft of the speech, the committee said, included no mention of Mr. Pence. But after the call, the president included language that video footage showed riled up the mob.“I hope Mike is going to do the right thing,” Mr. Trump said in his speech. “I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win.”“All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people,” Mr. Trump continued, referring to one of his demands that Mr. Pence send the election results back to the states, a delaying tactic that he hoped would ultimately keep him in office. If Mr. Pence failed to comply, Mr. Trump told the crowd, “that will be a sad day for our country.’’He added, “So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do. And I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that he’s listening to,” using the term for “Republicans in name only.”Mr. Trump directed his supporters to march to the Capitol and make themselves heard.By the time Mr. Pence arrived at the Capitol with his wife, Karen Pence, and their daughter Charlotte, an angry mob was already massing outside.Inside, as the joint session began, Mr. Pence’s aides released a memo to the public laying out the vice president’s view that he did not have the power over the certification that Mr. Trump and his lawyer, John Eastman, insisted he did.Shortly after 2:10 p.m., the proceedings were interrupted by loud noises. The mob was swarming into the building. At 2:24 p.m. — when Democrats on the committee said Mr. Trump was aware that the Capitol had been breached — the president posted to Twitter that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what was necessary.”At that point, the Secret Service had moved Mr. Pence from the Senate chamber to his office across the hall. His advisers said the noise from the rioters had become audible, leading them to assume they had entered the building. Yet there was not yet a pervasive sense of alarm.Mr. Pence in his office in the Capitol on Jan. 6 shortly after leaving the Senate chamber.White HouseOnce in his office, Mr. Pence sat with his family, including his brother, Representative Greg Pence and top aides as Mr. Short ducked downstairs to grab some food. Mrs. Pence drew the curtains to keep the rioters from looking in.Mr. Short made his way back to the office. By then, Tim Giebels, the lead Secret Service agent for Mr. Pence, had made a few attempts to nudge Mr. Pence and his family to move to a different location. But soon he was no longer making a suggestion. Mr. Pence, he said, had to get to safety.The entourage began to make its way down a stairway toward an underground loading dock — the point at which they came within 40 feet of the rioters. Mr. Pence and his aides did not know at the time just how close they were to the mob, some of whom were threatening to kill him.“I could hear the din of the rioters in the building,” Mr. Jacob said Thursday at the hearing. “I don’t think I was aware they were as close as that.”From the loading dock, Mr. Pence handled calls to congressional leaders who had been evacuated from the Capitol complex and ordered the Pentagon to send in the National Guard. The Secret Service directed him to get into a car and evacuate, but he refused to leave the building.“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,” Mr. Jacob said Thursday, noting that Mr. Pence did not want to give the rioters the satisfaction of disrupting the proceedings more than they had already done. “He was determined that we would complete the work that we had set out to do that day.”One person he never spoke with again that day was Mr. Trump, who did not call to check on Mr. Pence’s safety. Neither did the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.Just after 8 p.m., the Senate chamber opened again, after the rioters had been cleared from the complex.“Today was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol,” Mr. Pence said as the proceedings began again. He was greeted with applause when he said, “Let’s get back to work.”Back at the White House, egged on by some of his advisers, Mr. Trump told aides he wanted to bar Mr. Short from entering the West Wing from then on.At 3:42 in the morning, it was all over. Mr. Biden’s victory had been certified.At 3:50 a.m., as Mr. Pence and Mr. Short went their separate ways, Mr. Short texted his boss a passage from the Bible.“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith,” the message read. More

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      4 Takeaways From Today’s Jan. 6 Hearing

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      The Jan. 6 committee’s hearing on Thursday, which documented the relentless but unsuccessful campaign by President Donald J. Trump to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into helping him to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, swerved wildly at times between wonky discussions of constitutional law and unsettling images of the threats and violence that Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Pence inspired.But at the heart of the committee’s presentation was a straightforward narrative.Weeks before the mob attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump joined forces with a law professor named John Eastman, who was espousing a theory that Mr. Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, had the power to alter the outcome of the election — or at least to delay certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.Armed with this dubious legal cudgel, and with his other avenues for retaining power closing off, Mr. Trump pushed and pushed at Mr. Pence, including publicly on Jan. 6, helping to rile up his supporters and trigger the riot at the Capitol.Mr. Pence — backed by his own advisers and other legal experts — resisted Mr. Trump from the moment the idea came up.Here are four takeaways from Thursday’s hearing.Even Eastman doubted his plan’s legality, and he let Trump know that.The panel displayed on Thursday an image of the handwritten notes of Greg Jacob, attorney for Vice President Mike Pence, from a meeting with John Eastman.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Trump went ahead with the pressure campaign on Mr. Pence even though Mr. Eastman, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and a law professor at Chapman University, was less than certain at times about the legality and political viability of his own plan.The committee, for example, introduced an email that Mr. Eastman had written in the early stages of the scheme, in which he said that the idea of having lawmakers in pro-Trump states draft alternate slates of electors to give Mr. Pence a reason for disputing the results was “dead on arrival in Congress.”Mr. Eastman also admitted in a private conversation with Mr. Pence’s top lawyer, Greg Jacob, that if the Supreme Court ever had to rule on the legality of a vice president deciding the results of an election on his own, the court would unanimously vote to toss the matter, Mr. Jacob testified.But more important, Mr. Jacob told the committee in a videotaped deposition — snippets of which were played during the hearing — that Mr. Eastman had admitted in Mr. Trump’s presence that the plan to pressure Mr. Pence violated an 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act. According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Eastman acknowledged the illegality of the scheme in front of Mr. Trump on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days before Mr. Pence was to oversee the certification of the election.That crucial admission by Mr. Eastman was highlighted by Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman, who has long suggested that Mr. Trump could be charged with a federal crime for the role he played in obstructing the certification of the vote count on Jan. 6.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee assembled an account of how Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him not to declare victory on election night in 2020, but instead he listened to Rudolph W. Giuliani.A Striking Contrast: Many Trump officials have told the committee that they tried to dissuade the former president from his bid to overturn the election. But at the time, their words were far different in public.Fund-Raising Tactics: The Jan. 6 panel has raised questions about Mr. Trump’s aggressive solicitations, accusing him of misleading donors with election fraud claims.If prosecutors can prove that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman were aware in advance that the scheme to pressure Mr. Pence would violate the law, it could be an important piece of evidence suggesting intent, should the Justice Department decide to pursue a criminal case against either of them.Both Ms. Cheney and a colleague on the committee, Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, mentioned that a federal judge had already ruled in a related civil suit that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman most likely conspired together to obstruct the certification of the election and to commit fraud against the United States.In his ruling from March, Judge David O. Carter wrote that “the illegality of the plan was obvious,” calling it a “coup in search of a legal theory.”Mr. Eastman was apparently sufficiently worried about being prosecuted for his role that he inquired a few days after Jan. 6 about getting a pardon before Mr. Trump left office.Pence never wavered on rebuffing Trump.Vice President Mike Pence, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, certifying the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIf there was one thing the committee’s hearing made clear, it was that Mr. Pence, despite his history of loyalty to Mr. Trump, never believed he had the power to decide the election — and almost no one else in Mr. Trump’s orbit did, either.According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Pence’s “first instinct” was to reject the notion out of hand, undercutting assertions by Mr. Trump’s allies at the time that he was open to the idea. Mr. Jacob told the committee that even during his first meeting with Mr. Pence about Mr. Eastman’s plan, the vice president was horrified, saying he did not believe that the founders who “abhorred concentrated power” would have ever agreed that one person — especially one who had an interest in the outcome — could have exercised sole discretion over an election.Mr. Pence, it turned out, had wide support both inside and outside the White House. The committee, in its presentation, offered up a lengthy list of aides and advisers who seemed to disagree with Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman.In a recorded deposition, Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, said that Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s own chief of staff, agreed that the vice president did not have a broad or decisive role to play in determining election results.Another top Trump aide, Jason Miller, in his own recorded deposition, told the committee that Pat Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, thought Mr. Eastman’s plan was “nutty.” He added that Sean Hannity, the very pro-Trump Fox News host, felt that Mr. Pence had done the “right thing” by rebuffing it.Even Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, seemed to doubt Mr. Eastman’s legal theory, according to Eric Herschmann, a former top White House lawyer. But, as Mr. Herschmann noted in a recorded deposition, that did not stop Mr. Giuliani from publicly promoting Mr. Eastman’s plan on Jan. 6.There was no legal underpinning to the Eastman plan.J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, speaking during Thursday’s hearing.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAt times, the hearing sounded not unlike like a law school seminar on election procedure, with highly technical discussions of how the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 fit into the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act.Leading those discussions was J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, revered by conservatives. On the morning before the Capitol attack, Judge Luttig posted a thread of messages on Twitter asserting that Mr. Pence had no power to use his own discretion in deciding the election.“The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast,” Judge Luttig wrote.He added: “The Constitution does not empower the vice president to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise.”In his testimony on Thursday, Judge Luttig denounced Mr. Eastman’s plan as “constitutional mischief,” adding that if Mr. Pence had gone along with it, it would have “plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America.”The pressure campaign helped trigger the violence.Supporters of President Donald J. Trump storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s public calls for Mr. Pence to carry out Mr. Eastman’s plan raised expectations among his supporters that the vice president would do so — and ignited fury when he did not.Mr. Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, had grown sufficiently concerned about the potential for Trump supporters to turn against the vice president that he alerted the Secret Service on Jan. 5.Mr. Pence continued to rebuff Mr. Trump even after a call from the president on the morning of Jan. 6 in which Mr. Trump called him a “wimp” and worse, according to testimony gathered by the committee.At 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump sent out a tweet that said, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”One Trump aide told the committee that it felt at the time like Mr. Trump was “pouring gasoline on the fire.” Immediately, the committee said, there was a noticeable surge in the crowds both inside and outside the Capitol, some of whom began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”Mr. Pence was evacuated from his ceremonial office in the Senate and taken to a secure location, barely escaping the angry mob that breached the building. When Mr. Aguilar told Mr. Jacob, who had been with Mr. Pence in the Capitol that day, that members of the crowd had been only 40 feet from them, he seemed unnerved.“I could hear the din of the rioters in the building while we moved,” Mr. Jacob said. “But I don’t think I was aware that they were as close as that.” More