6 Jan. Select Committee Aide Claims Trump’s Pressure on Pence ‘Put Vice President’s Life in Danger’

Donald Trump and Mike Pence were in lockstep for most of the 45th US president’s term. However, their relationship soured following Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, which was described by then-outgoing POTUS as “the most corrupt” in US history.

The House 6 January Select Committee will present evidence during its third public hearing on Thursday to show how then-president Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure then-vice president Mike Pence to block certification of the 2020 election led to the Capitol breach, according to CNN.

“We’re going to show that that pressure campaign directly contributed to the attack on the Capitol, and it put the vice president’s life in danger,” one of the panel’s aides was cited by NBC News as telling reporters on Wednesday.

They added that the Thursday hearing would focus on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence despite being told by lawyers in the White House counsel's office that the vice president did not have the authority to unilaterally subvert the election results.

Trump has spent months attacking Pence and other former members of his administration, as he asserted that the ex-VP “could have overturned the election” by rejecting the votes sent in by delegates from states where the Trump campaign claimed electoral manipulation allegedly took place. Trump said he believes the vice president had the power to throw out individual delegate votes under the Electoral Count Act of 1887.

Pence declined to yield to Trump’s demands and, in his capacity as chairman of the Joint Session of Congress, formally certified the vote to confirm the victory of Democratic candidate Joe Biden following the 4 November 2020 election.

Barr: Trump Apparently Had No Interest in Facts

The aides’ claims on Wednesday followed former US Attorney General Bill Barr telling the select committee during the second hearing on 13 June that Trump seemed to have no interest in the facts when he was making election fraud allegations.

“I thought, ‘boy … he’s become detached from reality, if he really believed this stuff’. On the other hand when I went into this and would tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts are,” Barr argued.

This was preceded by the panel’s first hearing last week, when House select committee chairman, Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, and vice-chairman, GOP Representative Liz Cheney, squarely blamed Trump for the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.

In a social media message after the hearing, the 45th US president criticised the committee for not showing “the many positive witnesses and statements” and playing “only negative footage”.

The ex-POTUS earlier insisted that the work of the select committee is a show trial intended to score political points since the FBI had already investigated the matter, finding scant evidence that the 6 January Capitol breach was the result of an organised plot to overturn the presidential election results.

Republican lawmakers have also criticised the timing of the the panel’s hearings, claiming it is an effort by Democrats to undermine Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections scheduled for November.

Capitol Breach

On 6 January 2021, crowds of protesters, including scores of Trump supporters, breached the US Capitol in a bid to prevent lawmakers from certifying the 2020 election results, in what came after the Stop Steal rally, during which the 45th president claimed about the rigged voting.

The crowd breaking into the Capitol building and clashing with police led to four people dying and dozens more being injured, including at least 138 police officers.

Trump was accused of "incitement of insurrection" despite the fact that he used his now-suspended Twitter account, urging his supporters "to stay peaceful" and "go home", and recording a video address on 7 January condemning the violence.

Democratic lawmakers used the Capitol beach events to try to permanently ban Trump from politics by impeaching him a second time. However, the impeachment trial failed in the Senate in February 2021, when Trump was already out of office.