Presidential Election of 2020

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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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      Amid Jan. 6 Revelations, Election Lies Still Dominate the G.O.P.

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      The hearings have demolished the myth of a stolen presidential election, but with the 2022 primary season in full tilt, the revelations have not loosened the grip of the lie on Republicans.WASHINGTON — It was all a lie, the tales of stuffed ballot drop boxes, rigged voting machines, and constitutional “flexibility” that would have allowed Vice President Mike Pence to nullify the 2020 election results and send them back to Republican state legislatures.The first three hearings of the House Jan. 6 committee have deeply undercut, if not demolished, the postelection myths repeated incessantly by former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters and embraced and amplified by Republicans in Congress.A parade of Republican witnesses — his attorney general, William P. Barr, his daughter Ivanka Trump, and his own campaign lawyers — knew he had lost the election and told him so. Mr. Trump was informed that the demands he was making of Mr. Pence to block his defeat unilaterally were illegal. Even the most active coup plotter, the conservative lawyer John C. Eastman, conceded before Jan. 6 that his scheme was illegal and unconstitutional, then sought a presidential pardon after it led to mob violence.Yet the most striking revelation so far may be how deeply Mr. Trump’s disregard for the truth and the rule of law have penetrated into the Republican Party, taking root in the fertile soil of a right-wing electorate stewing in conspiracy theories and well tended by their media of choice. The Republican response to the hearings — a combination of indifference, diversion and doubling down — reflects how central the lie of a stolen election has become to the party’s identity.In Washington, Republicans in Congress have neither broken with Mr. Trump nor expended much energy trying to rebut the investigation’s findings. And from Nevada’s secretary of state race to Michigan’s contest for governor, Republican candidates have embraced the fictional conspiracy in their 2022 campaigns.“I have been fighting for safe, honest and transparent elections since before Jan. 6, and that fight continues,” said Michigan State Representative Steve Carra, whose re-election run has been blessed by Mr. Trump and who said Friday he has watched some but not much of the hearings. “Absentee ballots sent out unsolicited, signature verification relaxed, drop boxes all over the place, especially in Democratic area — it all deserves further scrutiny.”Like mint in the garden, the seeds that the Trump team planted between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, are now growing out of control, aided by the former president’s allies.Jarome Bell, a leading candidate to challenge Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia, has been traveling her Republican-leaning district showing voters a film by the right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza that pushes the bogus fraud claims. The hearings, he said on Friday, have had “no impact on me. ‘2000 Mules’ has a bigger impact on what truly happened.” He added, “the 1/6 commission is the cover-up.”Despite coverage of the hearings, at least one lawmaker lamented that his constituents were not paying much attention.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJon Rocha, a candidate for state representative in Michigan who has Mr. Trump’s backing, also cited the film and bragged that he had watched none of the hearings, “not even a 30-second clip.”One reason the falsehoods have flourished is the failure of Republicans who do not believe them to push back. Before the Jan. 6 hearings began, Republican leaders promised a robust “rapid response” effort to counter the narratives that would emerge.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.But there has been no such pushback from the Republican National Committee or any other organization to revelations that Mr. Trump continued to pressure Mr. Pence to overturn the election results, even after having been told doing so was illegal.No Republican leader offered a response to the testimony of retired federal appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a revered conservative, who said on Thursday that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Pence an order whose execution would have prompted “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”None bothered to counter the panel’s finding, revealed on Monday, that Mr. Trump and his campaign raised hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters based on the false pretense of massive election fraud, using money collected for an election defense fund that did not exist.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, has chosen not to engage on the issue at all. And to the extent that they are trying to counterprogram the hearings, House Republicans have been prodding voters to look elsewhere — to rising gas prices, inflation and migrants at the southern border.Only Mr. Trump seems particularly irritated by the exercise, appalled by the testimony of his daughter, who shared details of his abusive phone call with Mr. Pence on the morning of Jan. 6 and said she trusted Mr. Barr’s judgment when he said that the 2020 election was not stolen.“It’s a one-way street, it’s a rigged deal, it’s a disgrace,” a thoroughly unrepentant Mr. Trump said on Friday at a speech in Nashville in which he called Jan. 6 “a simple protest that got out of hand” as he continued spinning out false claims and grand conspiracy theories of election fraud.But if his allies in Republican leadership are not countering the message that the attack was fueled by lies, neither are they acknowledging that the election was not stolen.And 50 years to the day after henchmen of Richard M. Nixon broke into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, the hearings sparked by the two scandals are highlighting just how dramatically the Republican Party has changed. Then, key Republican leaders reacted to increasingly damning revelations about their president by siding with the Democrats and forcing Mr. Nixon from power. Today, Republican leaders are either silent or contemptuous of the committee uncovering a steady stream of misdeeds by Mr. Trump.Representatives Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney, and Adam B. Schiff “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, wrote on Twitter, referring to the Democratic chairman from Mississippi, Republican vice chairwoman from Wyoming and Democratic member from California.Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting Jan. 6, said the hearings have so far been “a reminder of how deeply divided, even from an information consumption standpoint, we are.”Many of his constituents have not even seen the videotaped testimony laying out the case against Mr. Trump — only footage of police removing barricades to let rioters into the Capitol on Jan 6. Some blame nonexistent F.B.I. provocateurs for the violence, in line with a debunked conspiracy theory embraced by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others on the right.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California and other Republican leaders held a news conference in the Capitol on Thursday to attack the committee’s work.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesMr. Meijer said he has heard far more from constituents on the right lamenting the “Jan. 6 political prisoners” than those in the center demanding accountability for the attack.Most voters, though, are not paying attention, said Representative David Valadao of California, another Republican to vote for impeachment.“Talking to voters at home right now — I mean, the fuel prices, food prices, baby formula, you name it,” Mr. Valadao said. “There’s just so many things that people are focused on right now that they’re just not paying attention to the Jan. 6 stuff as much as I know a lot of folks would want them to.”Asked if the hearings might do Republicans a favor by making it easier to find an alternative presidential nominee in 2024 than Mr. Trump, he responded: “I don’t know if enough people are paying attention where it’ll have that big of an impact.”But in a Republican primary season fueled by pro-Trump fervor, many candidates have emerged as their party’s nominees for top offices in large part because they campaigned on the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen by President Biden.The Republican nominees for governor in Pennsylvania, secretary of state in Nevada, Senate in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and attorney general in Texas all tried to overturn the 2020 election or embraced false claims of voter fraud.Mayra Flores, a Texas Republican who won a House seat in a special election on Tuesday, has declined to say whether Mr. Biden won in 2020, telling The San Antonio Express-News: “I’m speaking just in general. There is voter fraud.”And there is more to come. State Representative Ron Hanks, vying to challenge Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, in Colorado’s Republican primary June 28, marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and launched his campaign with an ad showing him shooting a fake Dominion voting machine, a device central to a sprawling conspiracy theory about votes purportedly stolen by foreign powers from Mr. Trump.On Monday, the committee showed a videotaped deposition in which Mr. Barr at one point could barely suppress his laughter at the absurdity of such stories and testified that Mr. Trump would have had to be “detached from reality” if he believed them.In Michigan, a wild contest to choose the Republican to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is narrowly led by Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker who was arrested this month and charged with participating in the Jan. 6 riot. Mr. Rocha, the state house candidate in Western Michigan, said voters were far more concerned about gas prices and empty store shelves than the Jan. 6 hearings, then offered that voters in fact are still very angry about “election integrity.”“They did it in 2020. Now they’re finding new avenues to remove Republicans from the ballot this year,” he said.In Arizona, the leading Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has made her “stolen election” claims central to her campaign. Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, was at the front steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6. And Blake Masters, who hopes to challenge Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, suggested baselessly that “one-third of the people outside of the Capitol complex on Jan. 6 were actual F.B.I. agents.”Annie Karni 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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      How the Proud Boys Breached the Capitol on Jan. 6: Rile Up the Normies

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      Using evidence that’s hidden in plain sight, our investigative journalists present a definitive account of the news — from the Las Vegas massacre to a chemical attack in Syria.Using evidence that’s hidden in plain sight, our investigative journalists present a definitive account of the news — from the Las Vegas massacre to a chemical attack in Syria. More

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      Ginni Thomas Has a Lot of Explaining to Do

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      Again and again, during the years that Donald Trump was in the White House, liberals would ask themselves a single question: “Can you imagine if Barack Obama had done this?”“This,” of course, was any one of the antics or misdeeds that marked Trump’s time in office: the lies, the insults, the cruelty and the criminality. Imagine if Obama had gone out of his way to excuse the equivalent of a white supremacist mob; imagine if Obama had gone to the site of a natural disaster and tossed out paper towels like so many footballs; imagine if he had railed against “shithole countries” or tried to pressure a foreign leader into turning over information to undermine his political opponents.Imagine what would have happened if Barack Obama had plotted to subvert and overturn a presidential election that he had lost.Republicans would have lost their minds. Having whipped themselves into a lather over fake scandals and manufactured controversies during the actual Obama administration, they would have exploded into paroxysms of partisan rage over any one of these misdeeds. The Benghazi hearings would have looked like a sober-minded investigation compared with what Republicans would have unleashed if the shoe had been on the other foot.The point of this mental exercise, for liberals, was to highlight the hypocrisy of the Republican Party under Trump. Tucked into this attempt to condemn Republican behavior, however, is an important observation about the value of political theater. All this conservative hysteria did not defeat Barack Obama at the ballot box, but it may have helped to put his party at a disadvantage.The main effect of these years of Republican scandal mongering was to produce a cloud of suspicion and mistrust that helped to undermine Obama’s preferred successor as president, as well as to shield Trump, as the 2016 Republican nominee, from the kind of scrutiny that might have made him more vulnerable.Democrats do not need to mimic Republican behavior in all of its deranged glory, but they would do well to heed the lesson that for many voters, where there is smoke, there must be fire.It is with this knowledge in mind that Democrats in Washington should do something about Ginni Thomas, who has just been asked to testify before the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. The reason is straightforward. Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, worked with allies of Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (Thomas quickly let it be known that she was looking “forward to talking to” the committee and couldn’t wait “to clear up misconceptions.”)Earlier this year, we learned that Thomas exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in the weeks and days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. We also learned, last month, that she urged Arizona Republicans to discard the results of the election and choose a “clean slate of Electors” for Trump.And we’ve learned this week from the Jan. 6 committee that Thomas also sent messages directly to John Eastman, the conservative lawyer (and former law clerk for Justice Thomas) who essentially devised the plan to try to overturn the 2020 presidential results.Eastman spoke at the “stop the steal” rally before the attack and even requested a pardon by way of Rudy Giuliani for his activities leading up to the insurrection: “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”“Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known,” The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Eastman, for his part, claimed to have known of a “heated” dispute among the Supreme Court justices over whether to hear arguments about the 2020 election. “So the odds are not based on the legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that there is a heated fight underway,” he is said to have written in an email to another lawyer. (On Thursday, Eastman posted a rebuttal on Substack asserting that he’d heard about the “heated fight” from news reports and that he could “categorically confirm that at no time did I discuss with Mrs. Thomas or Justice Thomas any matters pending or likely to come before the Court.”)But if the first revelation, of Thomas’s correspondence with Meadows, was shocking, then these revelations of Thomas’s contact with Eastman are explosive. And it raises key questions, not just about what Ginni Thomas knew, but about what Clarence Thomas knew as well. How, exactly, did Eastman know of tensions on the court? And why did he predict to Greg Jacobs, chief counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, that the Supreme Court would rule 7-2 in support of his legal theory about the Electoral College certification process before conceding that in fact that might not be the case?So while the committee is rightly seeking testimony from Ginni Thomas, Democrats should say something too. They shouldn’t just say something, they should scream something.Not only did Ginni Thomas try to make herself a part of the effort to overthrow the government, but Justice Thomas was the only member of the court to vote in favor of Donald Trump’s attempt to shield his communications from congressional investigators, communications that would have included the messages between Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas.There is something suspect happening with the Supreme Court, and other constitutional officers have every right to criticize it. Democratic leaders in Congress should begin an investigation into Ginni Thomas’s activities and announce that they intend to speak to her husband as well. President Biden should tell the press that he supports that investigation and hopes to see answers. Rank-and-file Democrats should make a stink about potential corruption on the court whenever they have the opportunity. Impeachment should be on the table.This probably won’t win votes. It could, however, capture the attention of the media and even put Republicans on the defensive. It is true that politics are unpredictable and that there’s no way to say exactly how a given choice will play out in the real world. But if the much maligned (and politically successful) investigations into Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails are any indication, real pressure might turn additional revelations into genuine liabilities for the Republican Party.The easiest thing for Democrats to do, of course, is nothing — to steer away from open conflict and leave the controversy (and the questions) to the select committee. But if Democrats choose instead to act like a political party should, they would do well to remember that if the tables were turned, their opponents would not hesitate to use every argument, and every tool, at their disposal.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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      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