When Will January 6th Be Over?
When Will January 6th Be Over?
Donald Trump, in trying to obstruct the investigation into the Capitol riot, is fighting not only to impose his view of the past but to insure his political future.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/when-will-january-6th-be-over
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
October 31, 2021
After Donald Trump lost the Presidential election last year, a law professor named John Eastman drafted, for Trump’s use, a two-page manual for unlawfully throwing out the electoral votes of certain states as they were being tallied in Congress, on January 6th. The name he mentions most often in the memo is that of Vice-President Mike Pence. It appears in such statements as “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected” and, regarding disrupting the count, “The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission.” Eastman also spoke at Trump’s January 6th rally, where he said that what “we are demanding of Vice-President Pence” is that he intervene in the electoral count. Trump, speaking shortly afterward, cited Eastman’s authority when he said, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”
Soon afterward, the assault on the Capitol began, and, once it became clear that the Vice-President was not going to do what Trump and his allies demanded, a group of insurrectionists chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Members of the Pence family were also in the Capitol, and in danger. Eastman is expected to be subpoenaed in the coming days by the House select committee investigating the events surrounding January 6th. In addition to writing that memo, and a revised, more detailed one—in which he declares that letting the results stand would mean that Americans were no longer “a self-governing people”—he attended a meeting with Trump and Pence in the Oval Office on January 4th. (Eastman says that he ultimately advised Pence to delay the count, not to stage a coup.) An area of inquiry for the committee is how much pressure Trump put on Pence to help him overturn the election. (A lot, it seems.)
But one person who doesn’t appear eager to dwell on that question, at least not publicly, is Pence himself, who has been biding his time giving speeches and setting up an organization called Advancing American Freedom. Last month, in an interview with Sean Hannity, on Fox News, he said that the media is trying to use January 6th to distract from President Biden’s “failed agenda” and to “demean the character and intentions” of people who voted for Trump. He assured Hannity that he and Trump had “parted amicably” after leaving office, and had stayed in touch. On social media and in a podcast he has launched, he steadily repeats the phrase “Trump-Pence Administration”—linking his name with that of a man who was ready to abandon him to a mob.
Pence’s position is intriguing on a human level, but it is significant in political terms, too, because it captures so much about the state of the G.O.P., where the 2024 Presidential race is headed, and how much the contest over the legacy of January 6th matters in setting that course. Trump seems to realize that as much as anybody. After Pence appeared on Fox News, Trump put out a statement saying that the interview “very much destroys and discredits the Unselect Committees Witch Hunt on the events of January 6th.” The interview does not do that, of course. But the Trump-Pence dance underscores how high the stakes are for the committee. Trump, in trying to obstruct the investigation into January 6th—with spurious claims of executive privilege, for example—is fighting not only to impose his view of the past but to insure his political future.
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