Jan. 6 hearing Pro-Trump lawyer sought pardon after pushing plan to overturn election

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. — Gene Griessman, a former head of the sociology department at Auburn University, watched in disgust Thursday as the Jan. 6 committee played video of insurrectionists calling for the death of Vice President Mike Pence.

“One cannot believe it,” Griessman said. “Americans without embarrassment would put up gallows and say openly, ‘Let’s kill him.’ That kind of thing does not happen in a great democracy.” Recalling hostile chants about Hillary Clinton in 2016, he said, “It’s a straight line from ‘Lock her up’ to ‘Hang Mike Pence.’”

Griessman, an 88-year-old Democrat, watched the hearings from his home in Sandy Springs, north of Atlanta. He considers himself a lifelong student of Abraham Lincoln.

“Lincoln described himself as a temporary occupant of ‘this big White House,’” Griessman said. “Trump thought he would never have to leave.”

Griessman was thoroughly impressed with J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge, who testified that had Pence ignored the electoral college and popular votes as Trump wished, the country would have been plunged into “a revolution within a constitutional crisis.”

“The man has gravitas,” Griessman said, referring to the retired judge.

Griessman said that while Luttig’s statements were clear, the testimony briefly got into the weeds with a degree of “minutia the American public does not care about.” He also found tedious the lengthy back and forth involving Greg Jacob, Pence’s former counsel, talking about his arguments with Trump attorney John Eastman. “We’ve heard it at least three times. The people watching may be entranced by that, but I’m not. My personal view is this part is tiresome and redundant.”

Griessman admired Pence’s refusal to block the confirmation of the election results at his own peril.

“I thought it was an act of great courage,” Griessman said. “I can’t think of anyone on Jan. 6 who was more courageous than Mike Pence.”

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), who helped lead Thursday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing, said after its conclusion that other individuals who have knowledge of or had communications with Donald Trump leading up to the insurrection should come forward.

Aguilar specifically name-checked House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.); Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who was shown on surveillance cameras giving tours of the Capitol complex the day before the attack; and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who corresponded with Trump lawyer John Eastman about his attempts to overturn the election results.

“We’re not going to close the door on hearing from anyone,” Aguilar told CNN’s Jake Tapper, declining to elaborate further on any specific possible witnesses.

Of Thursday’s hearing, Aguilar said he felt that the committee made a clear and compelling case that Mike Pence’s safety was in danger on Jan. 6, 2021.

“He was 40 feet away from the mob as he was being evacuated. And I think that’s just absolutely stunning,” Aguilar said. “This concerted effort that individuals undertook to threaten the safety of members of Congress who were exercising their constitutional obligations, in addition to senators and the vice president, is very shocking and we shouldn’t take it lightly at all”

Asked about reports that Trump is demanding “equal time” to rebut the Jan. 6 committee’s findings and whether they would seek to have the former president testify, Aguilar demurred.

“I’ll let the chairman speak to that offer if that is a real offer,” Aguilar said. “Clearly what we have also conveyed is that the former president only has a passing relationship with the truth, and so we want to make sure that we protect the integrity of the committee.”

FORT WORTH — Sitting in her classroom at a nonprofit summer school for kids, Hailey Hare watched the third Jan. 6 hearing, hoping something good would come of it.

She’s watched the clips of the shouting and the fighting, in and around the U.S. Capitol, and it reminded her of the days when she was a little girl in 7th grade.

Hare, 20, remembered the White parent at a junior high school basketball game who began screaming racial slurs at the only Black boy on the team.

“It scared me,” she said, because she was up next to play as one of the few players of color on her team.

And like the police officers who struggled with rioters on Jan. 6, Hare recalled the security officer and school officials who forcefully removed the hateful parent.

Hare is biracial — her mother’s White, her father’s Black — and she grew up in the conservative town of Big Sandy in East Texas, two hours from Dallas.

“I’m very proud we made it through that day, and democracy didn’t crumble,” said Hare, who is interning as a teacher at Fortress, a nonprofit school and day care in Southside, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Fort Worth.

Hare, who will be a senior at Texas A&M University-Commerce and is studying political science and African American studies, said more young people should be watching the hearings and focusing on what happened on Jan. 6.

But many of them aren’t interested in government, she said, because she feels they grew up in classrooms that ignored parts of the country’s history that made it look bad, like slavery.

Raised by her mother, her grandmother and her oldest sister, Hare said she doubts many people in Big Sandy, including close friends, are watching the hearings.

Why?

Because, Hare said, most, if not all of them, are Republicans, and they “don’t want to hear that Trump was wrong.”

The revelation that attorney John Eastman asked Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani to include him on the presidential pardon list reflects what experts have described as an unprecedented level of wheeling and dealing over clemency during the Trump administration. Trump’s transactional approach largely sidelined low-level offenders who had waited years after filing petitions through the Justice Department and elevated those with personal connections to the White House — or the money to pay someone with those connections.

Former president Donald Trump and his allies will attempt to overturn future elections as soon as 2024, retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig said during testimony to the Jan. 6 committee.

“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” he said.

Luttig said that Trump and his allies are now laying the groundwork to succeed in overturning future elections, a greater threat to American democracy than the Capitol attack itself.

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“That’s not because of what happened on Jan. 6,” he said. “It’s because to this very day, the former president, his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024 if the former president — or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate — were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”

“I don’t speak those words lightly,” Luttig cautioned. “I would have never spoken those words ever in my life except that that’s what the former president and his allies are telling us,” he continued.

“The former president and his allies are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public,” he warned.

Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said that to counter such efforts, the committee would recommend Congress explore changes to the Electoral Count Act and other measures to prevent a future campaign by Trump or others to subvert the democratic process.

Former vice president Mike Pence refused to get into Secret Service vehicles and potentially be evacuated from the Capitol complex for fear that it would vindicate the violent mob assailing the Capitol, Pence aides said.

“When we got down to the secure location, Secret Service directed us to get into the cars — which I did — and then I noticed that the vice president had not. So I got out of the car that I had gotten into,” Greg Jacob, Pence’s former counsel, said in testimony before the Jan. 6 committee.

The head of his Secret Service detail assured Pence that he would be safe and that the convoy would not leave Capitol grounds without his permission. Yet Pence objected, according to Jacob, replying: “Tim, I know you, I trust you, but you’re not the one behind the wheel.”

“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,” Jacob told lawmakers. “He was determined that we would complete the work that we had set out to do that day, that it was his constitutional duty to see it through and that the rioters who had breached the Capitol would not have the satisfaction of disrupting the proceedings beyond the day on which they were supposed to be completed.”

The committee published images from the National Archives showing Pence working to restore order amid the ongoing crisis. Pence and his chief of staff, Marc Short, made several calls to senior lawmakers and administration officials, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was also working to restore order. McCarthy expressed “frustration” that the White House was not doing more to stop the violence.

Trump never called Pence to determine his safety during the insurrection, Jacob said, which Pence’s family found “disappointing,” Jacob said.

In closing remarks, Jan. 6 committee chairman Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) thanked those who had testified on Thursday and said the country owed them “a great debt” for their loyalty to the Constitution.

Thompson said former vice president Mike Pence and his former counsel, Greg Jacob, were “exactly the people our nation needed at a critical time.”

“You had the courage to do what was right in the weeks leading up to January 6th,” Thompson said. “Many people failed this test when they had to choose between their oath to the country or the demands of Donald Trump. But there were others who, like you, stood tall in the face of intimidation and put our democracy first.”

Thompson warned that the danger to America’s democracy remained present.

“There are some who think the danger has passed that even though there were violence and a corrupt attempt to overturn the presidential election, the system worked,” Thompson said. “I look at it another way. Our system nearly failed and our democratic foundation destroyed, but for people like you.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair of the committee, previewed that subsequent hearings would indicate that efforts by Trump and John Eastman to stop the electoral count did not end with Pence.

“It targeted every tier of federal and state elected officials,” Cheney said. “We will examine all of those threats and we will examine the Trump team’s determination to transmit materially false electoral slates from multiple states to officials of the executive and legislative branches of our government. We will examine the pressures put on state legislatures to convene to reverse lawful election results.”

John Eastman, the Trump attorney who outlined scenarios for denying Joe Biden the presidency, asked for a presidential pardon via email, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) revealed Thursday.

Eastman, in an email to President Donald Trump’s then-attorney Rudy Giuliani, “requested that he be included on a list of potential recipients of a presidential pardon,” Aguilar said.

Aguilar then read from Eastman’s email, in which he said, “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”

Trump issued 143 pardons and commutations on his last night as president. Eastman did not receive a pardon.

The committee then shared clips from Eastman’s deposition before investigators, in which he invokes his Fifth Amendment right to not answer “a hundred times,” Aguilar said.

In the video, Eastman refuses to answer investigators’ questions on whether Trump’s legal team asked him to prepare a memo regarding Vice President Mike Pence’s role in the counting of electoral votes, and on whether he advised Trump that Pence could reject the certification of votes.