<mediadc-video-embed data-state="{"cms.site.owner":{"_ref":"00000161-3486-d333-a9e9-76c6fbf30000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b93390000"},"cms.content.publishDate":1655408120497,"cms.content.publishUser":{"_ref":"0000017f-1e8d-dbf3-a77f-9fef485e0000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"cms.content.updateDate":1655408120497,"cms.content.updateUser":{"_ref":"0000017f-1e8d-dbf3-a77f-9fef485e0000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"rawHtml":"
$bp("Brid_55407983", {"id":"27789","width":"16","height":"9","video":"1032401"}); ","_id":"00000181-6e03-dd13-a9fb-7e2f4ea20001","_type":"2f5a8339-a89a-3738-9cd2-3ddf0c8da574"}”>Video EmbedRetired federal appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig told the Jan. 6 select committee he believes pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman and his allies’ pressure campaign to push former Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electoral results of the 2020 election was “constitutional mischief.”
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Luttig told the House Jan. 6 committee there was no historical precedent to back up the legal theory they espoused to overturn the 2020 election, in which President Joe Biden beat former President Donald Trump.
Luttig testified that he advised Pence that his role was solely to “count the Electoral College votes as they have been cast,“ adding that he believes had the former vice president followed Trump’s orders, it would have caused “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.”
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Luttig, who previously mentored Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and scores of other conservative lawyers, argued that Eastman was taking advantage of “inartful wording” of one sentence in the 12th Amendment. Luttig stressed that any effort for the vice president to act in anything but a ceremonial role while certifying the count would have violated the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
“Even if then-Vice President Jefferson and even then-Vice President John Adams and even then-Vice President Richard Nixon had done exactly what the president of the United States wanted his vice president to do, I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice president overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent,” he said. “This is constitutional mischief.”
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During a video clip shown during the hearing, Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short testified that Trump was informed “many times” that Pence did not have the legal authority to change the results.
The hearing marks the third of several that the panel plans to carry out in the coming weeks laying out their findings from their investigation into the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol, when rioters breached the building in an attempt to district the certification of the election results.
