Former President Donald Trump’s own White House attorneys called the plan to overturn the 2020 election “completely crazy” and “nutty” according to interviews with the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol.
After Trump lost the election, conservative lawyer John Eastman pushed the idea that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the election.
Former White House lawyer Eric Hershmann told the select committee that he said to Eastman to “hold on a second,” and to confirm he was saying he believed that the Vice President, acting as president of the Senate, could be the “sole decision-maker in who becomes the next president of the United States”. Eastman said yes.
Hershmann said, “are you out of your effing mind?” And then asked Eastman if he was really going to tell 78 plus million people that “this is how you’re going to invalidate their votes.”
Trump campaign official Jason Miller also testified to the committee, and said that White House counsel Pat Cipollone thought the plan to have Pence attempt to overturn the election outcome was “nutty.”
Miller and Cipollone had “confronted Eastman with the same sentiment.”
Hershmann said it made no sense to him that in all of the protections that were built into the constitution for a president to be elected, that to choose the next president would be sitting with the Vice President.
Miller said there were two other members of Trump’s election legal team who thought Eastman was “crazy.” Miller said he heard other people say Eastman’s theory was “crazy” and that there was no validity to it in any way.
Jacob told the committee that Eastman told him “Al Gore did not have a basis to do it in 2000. Kamala Harris shouldn’t be able to do it in 2024. But I think you should do it today.”
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