Former Counsel to Mike Pence Testifies Before Jan 6 Committee

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A former vice presidential aide, Gregory Jacob, and a former US circuit judge, J Michael Luttig, testified on Thursday afternoon, June 16, before the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

In his testimony, Jacob said he advised Pence against delaying the vote count to certify the 2020 election, telling him he would be breaking the law. Jacob detailed how John Eastman, former Chapman University law professor, proposed the idea to delay the vote until the next day.

“When Mr Eastman came in, he said, ’I’m here to request that you reject the electors,’” Jacob told the committee on Thursday. “So, on the 4th, that had been the path that he had said, ’I’m not recommending’ […] but on the 5th he came in and expressly requested that.”

Jacob said Eastman encouraged Pence to delay the vote in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol. Credit: CSPAN via Storyful

Video Transcript

GREGORY JACOB: It is unambiguous that the vice president does not have the authority to reject electors. There is no suggestion of any kind that it does. There is no mention of rejecting or objecting to electors anywhere in the 12th Amendment.

And so the notion that the vice president could do that certainly is not in the text. But the problem that we had, and that John Eastman raised in our discussions, was we had all seen that in Congress, in 2000, in 2004, in 2016, there had been objections raised to various states. And those had even been debated in 2004.

And so here you have an amendment that says nothing about objecting or rejecting. And yet, we did have some recent practice of that happening within the terms of the Electoral Count Act.

So we started with that text. And I recalled in my discussion with the vice president, he said, I can't wait to go to heaven and meet the framers and tell them the work that you did in putting together our constitution is a work of genius. Thank you. It was divinely inspired. There is one sentence that I would like to talk to you a little bit about.

So then we went to structure. And again, the vice president's first instinct here is so decisive on this question. There is just no way that the framers of the constitution, who divided power and authority, who separated it out, who had broken away from George III and declared him to be a tyrant, there was no way that they would have put in the hands of one person the authority to determine who was going to be President of the United States.

And then we went to history. We examined every single--