The House committee investigating the Capitol riot plans to focus its hearing Thursday on the pressure that Donald Trump put on Vice President Mike Pence in a last-ditch and potentially illegal plan to stop Joe Biden’s election victory. Trump seized on the unorthodox proposal from conservative law professor John Eastman to have Pence turn back the electors when the vice president presided over Congress to certify the election results on Jan. 6, 2021. Dozens of court cases challenging the 2020 presidential election had collapsed. So Trump turned to the Eastman plan as a last resort to stay in office.
A look at the Eastman plan in the days before Jan. 6 and why it's central to the congressional investigation:Two days before the Capitol attack, Pence was summoned to the White House for an Oval Office meeting with Trump and Eastman to hear about the law professor’s plan to turn back the electors.
If Pence would refuse to count some electors, then the threshold needed to certify the presidential election would drop from the regular 270-vote majority to a lesser number — one presumably that Trump could reach. Jacob, who is scheduled to testify Thursday before the House committee, was at the Oval Office meeting with Trump and Pence when Eastman outlined the plan on Jan. 4. Jacob received an email from Eastman late the following night.
Routinely, lawmakers from the losing side of a presidential election would wage protest votes during the ceremonial proceedings in Congress. Several Democrats, including then-Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, joined a challenge to Ohio's electors after the 2004 election.
Jacob replied that he could not believe there was a single Supreme Court justice or any judge who would agree to toss election laws “that have been followed without exception for more than 130 years.”PRESSURE BUILDS, TRUMP CALLS PENCE "What I’m here to ask you to do is to reject the electors” Eastman said on Jan. 5, according to Jacob’s testimony.
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