On Monday, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a member of the hyper-partisan House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, protest and breach of the Capitol, commented on a reported quote made by former Vice President Mike Pence on the day of the event.
Reportedly, Pence made the comment when his security service attempted to convince him to leave the Capitol on January 6. Raskin referred to Pence’s words as “chilling.”
The context and clarity of the story are in question as the Post has been accused of propagating “fake news” and promoting anti-Trump views in its reporting, and the quote comes from the upcoming book, “I Alone Can Fix It,” written by two Washington Post journalists, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Also, it is widely viewed that the Select Committee, of which Raskin is a member, is incapable of objectivity.
An excerpt from the book, published in the Washington Post, notes that Pence was hesitant to leave the Capitol, though encouraged to do so by his security detail.
In the book, Pence is reported to have said to Tim Giebels, the agent in charge of his security detail, “I’m not getting in the car, Tim.”
Pence reportedly added: “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”
In an interview with MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes,” Raskin claimed that former President Trump and other officials went to great lengths to coerce Pence to reject the certification of the Electoral College vote.
The Electoral College vote notes Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, but Donald Trump has fiercely challenged the integrity of the election process.
Raskin told Hayes: “So there were all of these different efforts going on. And then it finally came down to everything focused on Mike Pence. … That was the Hail Mary play or what they were calling the Green Bay Sweep.”
“They were going to throw everything in there at Mike Pence, and they were going to try to pressure him and coerce him into rejecting Electoral College votes … in a way that would set the stage for a failure of a majority in the Electoral College and then kicking the whole thing into the House of Representatives under the 12th Amendment for a so-called contingent election.”
Raskin assesses that the pro-Trump security service was trying to remove Pence from the situation since the Vice President was not complying with the request not to certify the election:
“So when I…I heard that he said, ‘I’m not getting in our car,’ that was utterly chilling to me. Those are six of the most chilling words in American history to me because they were trying to remove him from the situation. And of course, there had been this effort to try to get Trump just to invoke martial law under the Insurrection Act.”
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