Jan. 6 Panel Hearings: Jan. 6 Hearings Day 3: Panel Says Trump Brought Nation to the Verge of a Constitutional Crisis (Published 2022) (2024)

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Trump, told it was illegal, still pressured Pence to overturn his loss.

In the third public hearing this month to lay out its findings, the panel recounted how Mr. Trump’s actions brought the nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis, and raised fresh questions about whether they were also criminal. It played videotaped testimony in which Mr. Pence’s top White House lawyer, Greg Jacob, said Mr. Eastman had admitted in front of Mr. Trump two days before the riot that his plan to have Mr. Pence obstruct the electoral certification violated the law.

Following the riot, Mr. Eastman sought a pardon after being informed by one of Mr. Trump’s top White House lawyers that he had criminal exposure for hatching the scheme, according to an email displayed by the committee during the session.

The panel also offered a reconstruction of Mr. Pence’s harrowing day on Jan. 6. It began with a heated phone call in which Mr. Trump berated him as a “wimp” and questioned his manhood for resisting his order to obstruct the electoral count. It grew more dire as the president, knowing his supporters were attacking the Capitol with the vice president inside, tweeted a public condemnation of him, further whipping up a crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

“We are fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage on Jan. 6,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee. “Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe.”

Through testimony from a conservative legal scholar, Mr. Jacob and other West Wing aides, as well as Mr. Pence’s own words, the committee dismantled the legal argument Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman relied on, showing that it had no legal or historical precedent — and went against the fundamental tenets of American democracy. They also showed that both men knew that their plans were not legitimate, but insisted on pushing forward anyway.

Had Mr. Pence followed Mr. Trump’s demands, it would have been “tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis,” J. Michael Luttig, a conservative retired federal appeals court judge, testified before the panel, using sweeping language to describe the threat to the rule of law. Judge Luttig, who had advised Mr. Pence against taking such action immediately beforehand, added on Thursday that had Mr. Trump succeeded, it would have amounted to “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”

And he warned that the threat remains, calling Mr. Trump and his supporters a “clear and present danger to American democracy.”

The panel’s inquiry is continuing; on Thursday, it wrote to Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, requesting an interview after obtaining an email exchange she had with Mr. Eastman. Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, is reviewing the request, a person familiar with the matter said.

In the hearing, the panel revealed that in the days after the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Eastman told Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in an email that he would like to be included in a list of people for Mr. Trump to pardon before leaving office. The committee showed a video clip of Mr. Eastman’s testimony in which he flatly answered “Fifth” to a series of questions about his scheme to invalidate the election results. He invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination 146 times during the interview, the panel said.

In one of the most dramatic moments of the hearing, the committee displayed a graphic of Mr. Pence’s flight from the Senate chamber as rioters stormed the Capitol. At 2:26 p.m., the mob was just down the hall from him to his left, only 40 feet away. It also showed previously unseen photographs of Mr. Pence huddled in his office off the Senate floor during the mayhem, as his wife pulled closed the drapes so they could not be seen, and of the vice president in a loading dock somewhere in the Capitol complex, at a time when he had refused to be evacuated from the premises.

“The vice president did not want the world to see the image of the vice president of the United States fleeing the Capitol,” Mr. Jacob said.

The portrait that emerged of Mr. Pence was that of a man who risked his life to prevent a meltdown of democracy set in motion by the president himself.

“Make no mistake about the fact that the vice president’s life was in danger,” said Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, who led much of the session.

The committee traced a remarkable series of events that began in December 2020, when Mr. Trump and his allies realized that they had exhausted all legal avenues to overturn the election and turned their attention to trying to keep Mr. Trump in office through Congress. Seeking to exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law that lays out the process by which Congress finalizes a presidential election, they argued that the vice president, who presides over the ceremonial session, could unilaterally throw out electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Jacob testified that his boss knew early on that the plan was unlawful. Mr. Pence’s first reaction upon hearing of it, Mr. Jacob said, was that there was “no way” this was “justifiable.”

When it came time to stand up to Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence told his staff, “This might be the most important thing I ever say,” Mr. Jacob testified.

By Jan. 4, Mr. Pence and Mr. Jacob were sitting in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman. At the meeting, Mr. Jacob recalled, Mr. Eastman admitted in front of the former president that his plan violated the Electoral Count Act.

Still, Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman pressed on, continuing with meetings and calls the next day. Mr. Jacob took notes. On Jan. 5, Mr. Eastman told him directly: “I’m here to request that you reject the electors.”

But as they discussed the legal arguments, it became clear Mr. Jacob had the law on his side. Mr. Eastman admitted his theories would fail 9 to 0 before the Supreme Court, Mr. Jacob said.

The pressure on Mr. Pence began to worry his chief of staff, Marc Short. A day before the mob violence, Mr. Short grew so concerned about Mr. Trump’s actions that he presented a warning to a Secret Service agent, according to videotaped testimony the panel played on Thursday: The president was going to publicly turn against the vice president, potentially creating a security risk to Mr. Pence.

Other aides and advisers were also imploring Mr. Eastman to abandon the plan.

“You’re going to cause riots in the streets,” Eric Herschmann, a White House counsel, testified that he told Mr. Eastman. In videotaped testimony, he said Mr. Eastman had responded: “There’s been violence in the history of our country to protect the democracy or protect the Republic.”

Mr. Jacob said his faith sustained him through the ordeal. He pulled out his Bible in the secure location with Mr. Pence and read a passage in which Daniel is thrown in the lion’s den after he refuses a king’s order, but is protected by God.

Later that evening, with the Capitol secure, Mr. Eastman emailed Mr. Jacob again still seeking to overturn the election.

Mr. Jacob showed it to the vice president. His response? “That’s rubber room stuff.”

Mr. Jacob described what Mr. Eastman was doing as “certifiably crazy.”

A federal judge has already concluded in a civil case that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman “more likely than not” committed two felonies in their attempts to overturn the election.

The panel has never heard from Mr. Pence himself, and at one point considered issuing a subpoena to obtain his testimony.

But Mr. Thompson said it ruled out a subpoena for Mr. Pence after receiving “significant information” from two of his top aides: Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob.

In a speech in February, Mr. Pence offered a rebuke of Mr. Trump, saying that the former president had been mistaken in asserting that Mr. Pence had the legal authority to change the results of the election and that the Republican Party must accept the outcome and look toward the future.

“President Trump is wrong,” Mr. Pence said in remarks before the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization. “I had no right to overturn the election.”

The Jan. 6 committee has been presenting the televised hearings as a series of movie-length chapters laying out the different ways in which Mr. Trump tried to cling to power. After an initial prime-time hearing that drew more than 20 million viewers, in which the panel sought to establish that the former president was at the center of the plot, investigators focused their second hearing on how Mr. Trump spread the lie of a stolen election.

Future hearings are expected to focus on how Mr. Trump and his allies pressured state officials to overturn the election; attempted to interfere with the Justice Department; created slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by Mr. Biden; and amassed a mob that marched on the Capitol, while the president did nothing to stop the violence for 187 minutes.

The committee has scheduled two more hearings, for June 21 and June 23, at 1 p.m.

Here are 4 takeaways from Thursday’s Jan. 6 hearing.

Weeks before the mob attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump joined forces with a law professor named John Eastman, who was espousing a theory that Mr. Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, had the power to alter the outcome of the election — or at least to delay certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.

Armed with this dubious legal cudgel, and with his other avenues for retaining power closing off, Mr. Trump pushed and pushed at Mr. Pence, including publicly on Jan. 6, helping to rile up his supporters and trigger the riot at the Capitol.

Mr. Pence — backed by his own advisers and other legal experts — resisted Mr. Trump from the moment the idea came up.

Here are four takeaways from Thursday’s hearing.

Even Eastman doubted his plan’s legality, and he let Trump know that.

Mr. Trump went ahead with the pressure campaign on Mr. Pence even though Mr. Eastman, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and a law professor at Chapman University, was less than certain at times about the legality and political viability of his own plan.

The committee, for example, introduced an email that Mr. Eastman had written in the early stages of the scheme, in which he said that the idea of having lawmakers in pro-Trump states draft alternate slates of electors to give Mr. Pence a reason for disputing the results was “dead on arrival in Congress.”

Mr. Eastman also admitted in a private conversation with Mr. Pence’s top lawyer, Greg Jacob, that if the Supreme Court ever had to rule on the legality of a vice president deciding the results of an election on his own, the court would unanimously vote to toss the matter, Mr. Jacob testified.

But more important, Mr. Jacob told the committee in a videotaped deposition — snippets of which were played during the hearing — that Mr. Eastman had admitted in Mr. Trump’s presence that the plan to pressure Mr. Pence violated an 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act. According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Eastman acknowledged the illegality of the scheme in front of Mr. Trump on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days before Mr. Pence was to oversee the certification of the election.

That crucial admission by Mr. Eastman was highlighted by Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman, who has long suggested that Mr. Trump could be charged with a federal crime for the role he played in obstructing the certification of the vote count on Jan. 6.

If prosecutors can prove that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman were aware in advance that the scheme to pressure Mr. Pence would violate the law, it could be an important piece of evidence suggesting intent, should the Justice Department decide to pursue a criminal case against either of them.

Both Ms. Cheney and a colleague on the committee, Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, mentioned that a federal judge had already ruled in a related civil suit that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman most likely conspired together to obstruct the certification of the election and to commit fraud against the United States.

In his ruling from March, Judge David O. Carter wrote that “the illegality of the plan was obvious,” calling it a “coup in search of a legal theory.”

Mr. Eastman was apparently sufficiently worried about being prosecuted for his role that he inquired a few days after Jan. 6 about getting a pardon before Mr. Trump left office.

Pence never wavered on rebuffing Trump.

If there was one thing the committee’s hearing made clear, it was that Mr. Pence, despite his history of loyalty to Mr. Trump, never believed he had the power to decide the election — and almost no one else in Mr. Trump’s orbit did, either.

According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Pence’s “first instinct” was to reject the notion out of hand, undercutting assertions by Mr. Trump’s allies at the time that he was open to the idea. Mr. Jacob told the committee that even during his first meeting with Mr. Pence about Mr. Eastman’s plan, the vice president was horrified, saying he did not believe that the founders who “abhorred concentrated power” would have ever agreed that one person — especially one who had an interest in the outcome — could have exercised sole discretion over an election.

Mr. Pence, it turned out, had wide support both inside and outside the White House. The committee, in its presentation, offered up a lengthy list of aides and advisers who seemed to disagree with Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman.

In a recorded deposition, Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, said that Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s own chief of staff, agreed that the vice president did not have a broad or decisive role to play in determining election results.

Another top Trump aide, Jason Miller, in his own recorded deposition, told the committee that Pat Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, thought Mr. Eastman’s plan was “nutty.” He added that Sean Hannity, the very pro-Trump Fox News host, felt that Mr. Pence had done the “right thing” by rebuffing it.

Even Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, seemed to doubt Mr. Eastman’s legal theory, according to Eric Herschmann, a former top White House lawyer. But, as Mr. Herschmann noted in a recorded deposition, that did not stop Mr. Giuliani from publicly promoting Mr. Eastman’s plan on Jan. 6.

There was no legal underpinning to the Eastman plan.

At times, the hearing sounded not unlike a law school seminar on election procedure, with highly technical discussions of how the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 fit into the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act.

Leading those discussions was J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, revered by conservatives. On the morning before the Capitol attack, Judge Luttig posted a thread of messages on Twitter asserting that Mr. Pence had no power to use his own discretion in deciding the election.

“The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast,” Judge Luttig wrote.

He added: “The Constitution does not empower the vice president to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise.”

In his testimony on Thursday, Judge Luttig denounced Mr. Eastman’s plan as “constitutional mischief,” adding that if Mr. Pence had gone along with it, it would have “plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America.”

The pressure campaign helped trigger the violence.

Mr. Trump’s public calls for Mr. Pence to carry out Mr. Eastman’s plan raised expectations among his supporters that the vice president would do so — and ignited fury when he did not.

Mr. Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, had grown sufficiently concerned about the potential for Trump supporters to turn against the vice president that he alerted the Secret Service on Jan. 5.

Mr. Pence continued to rebuff Mr. Trump even after a call from the president on the morning of Jan. 6 in which Mr. Trump called him a “wimp” and worse, according to testimony gathered by the committee.

At 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump sent out a tweet that said, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

One Trump aide told the committee that it felt at the time like Mr. Trump was “pouring gasoline on the fire.” Immediately, the committee said, there was a noticeable surge in the crowds both inside and outside the Capitol, some of whom began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”

Mr. Pence was evacuated from his ceremonial office in the Senate and taken to a secure location, barely escaping the angry mob that breached the building. When Mr. Aguilar told Mr. Jacob, who had been with Mr. Pence in the Capitol that day, that members of the crowd had been only 40 feet from them, he seemed unnerved.

“I could hear the din of the rioters in the building while we moved,” Mr. Jacob said. “But I don’t think I was aware that they were as close as that.”

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YouTube deleted a Jan. 6 committee video that included Trump’s election lies.

“We had glitches where they moved thousands of votes from my account to Biden’s account,” Mr. Trump said falsely, before suggesting the F.B.I. and Department of Justice may have been involved.

The excerpt of the hearing did not include Mr. Barr’s perspective, stated numerous times elsewhere in the hearing, that Mr. Trump’s assertion that the election was stolen was wrong. The video initially was replaced with a black box stating that the clip had been removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service.

“Our election integrity policy prohibits content advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, if it does not provide sufficient context,” YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi said in a statement. “We enforce our policies equally for everyone, and have removed the video uploaded by the Jan. 6 committee channel.”

The message on the video page has since been changed to “This video is private,” which may mean that YouTube would allow the committee to upload a version of the clip that makes clear that Trump’s claims are false.

In his testimony, Luttig warned about efforts to undermine democracy that are currently underway.

“That’s not because of what happened on Jan. 6,” Judge Luttig said. “It’s because to this very day, the former president, his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”

In his piece, Judge Luttig’s warning doubled as an appeal to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, and to write in legislative guardrails to prevent any future attempt to overturn an election. Since late last year, a bipartisan group of senators have been collaborating on overhauling that law.

Multiple candidates who either personally took steps to overturn results in their state or campaigned on falsehoods about the 2020 election have prevailed in Republican primaries across the country.

On Tuesday, Jim Marchant emerged as the winner in Nevada’s Republican primary for secretary of state. Mr. Marchant has said he would have refused to certify the state’s results in 2020 had he held the position then, and he has helped organize a professional network of 2020 election deniers.

Adam Laxalt, the state’s former attorney general who won the Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, was among the leaders of the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn Nevada’s results in 2020.

Like-minded candidates have entered and won races in other key battleground states, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Doug Mastriano, who won the Republican primary for governor in Pennsylvania last month, also aided Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his state’s results, and his campaign spent thousands of dollars to bus protesters to Washington on Jan. 6.

The Republican nominee in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Dr. Mehmet Oz, has also refused to acknowledge President Biden as the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

And in Michigan last week, Ryan Kelley, a Republican running for governor, was arrested by the F.B.I. and charged with several crimes related to the attack on the Capitol.

The number of candidates who have recently edged closer to positions in which they could use their authority to halt the certification of unwelcome election results in 2024 has in some ways lent credence to Judge Luttig’s prediction on Thursday.

“I don’t speak those words lightly,” he said about his warning on future attempts to overturn an election. “I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that’s what the former president and his allies are telling us.”

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John Eastman, who pushed a plan to reject Electoral College results, asked for a pardon shortly after Jan. 6.

Committee members played recorded video of testimony from Eric Herschmann, a top White House adviser and a lawyer who had worked for a firm representing President Donald J. Trump, who said that Mr. Eastman continued to press for a scheme to subvert Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory even after the riot.

“He said he couldn’t reach others. He started to ask me about something dealing with Georgia and preserving something potentially for appeal,” Mr. Herschmann said. “And I said to him, are you out of your f-ing mind. I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on: orderly transition. I don’t want to hear any other f-ing words coming out of your mouth no matter what.”

Then, he said, he told Mr. Eastman: “Get a great f-ing criminal defense lawyer. You’re going to need it. And I hung up on him.”

According to the committee members, a few days later, Mr. Eastman emailed another Trump lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, requesting that he be considered for a pardon as Mr. Trump prepared to issue dozens of them.

“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list if that is still in the works,” the email said. Mr. Eastman was not ultimately on the pardon list.

Mr. Herschmann’s testimony, combined with testimony from Vice President Mike Pence’s chief counsel, Greg Jacob, suggested that Mr. Eastman was told repeatedly both that he was suggesting a violation of the law and that he was warned it could lead to violence.

Justice Department accuses Jan. 6 committee of refusing to share transcripts.

The letter was earlier reported by Insider.

The committee conducted the interviews for this month’s public hearings on the matter, but it has no authority to charge anyone involved in the attack on Congress. Committee members have said that the Justice Department must do more to hold people accountable for their role in the attack.

In April, the Justice Department told the committee that its transcripts “may contain information relevant to a criminal investigation we are conducting.” But the committee refused to share them, saying that the request was premature because the committee was still working.

The committee is not expected to complete its work until this fall.

The Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into the attack has so far resulted in the arrests of more than 840 people involved in the riot and seditious conspiracy charges against the heads of two of the nation’s most prominent far right movements, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Prosecutors are also examining whether laws were broken in the weeks before the attack, as Mr. Trump’s allies looked to far-fetched legal arguments and voter fraud conspiracy theories to undermine his loss. Prosecutors have subpoenaed information related to some of the lawyers who worked on those schemes.

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Eastman says email with Virginia Thomas was innocuous.

Mr. Eastman was responding to reports in The Washington Post and The New York Times on Wednesday that the House committee investigating Jan. 6 had obtained email traffic between Mr. Eastman and Ms. Thomas. His comments came as the committee formally sought an interview with Ms. Thomas and requested that she turn over an extensive list of documents related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Mr. Eastman has become a pivotal figure in the committee’s hearings, since his legal advice to Mr. Trump after the election was central to Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the outcome. Mr. Eastman is a former clerk of Justice Thomas and a friend of the Thomases, and in January 2021 he reached out to other former Thomas clerks about his legal work on Mr. Trump’s behalf on an online network used by Ms. Thomas and the clerks. Ms. Thomas is an outspoken Republican activist and Trump supporter who pressed Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and lawmakers in Arizona to take steps to overturn the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr.

A flurry of text messages she wrote to Mr. Meadows were turned over to the committee and revealed earlier this year. They showed her fully embracing efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office, notwithstanding the will of voters.

“Do not concede,” she wrote, expressing hope that Mr. Biden’s family and allies, and members of the news media, would be taken to Guantánamo Bay.

The committee, in a letter to Ms. Thomas on Thursday, wrote that it had “obtained evidence that John Eastman worked to develop alternate slates of electors to stop the electoral count on Jan. 6.” The panel added that it had “evidence that you had certain communications with John Eastman during this time period. We believe you may have information concerning John Eastman’s plans and activities relevant to our investigation.”

Mr. Eastman said on Thursday that his communication with Ms. Thomas after the election was mundane. He released a copy of what he said was the email in question, in which Ms. Thomas asked him in December 2020 to provide “a status update to a group of grass-roots state leaders” with which she was affiliated.

“She invited me to give an update about election litigation to a group she met with periodically,” he wrote.

He also said that an email he wrote on Christmas Eve 2020 to other lawyers advising Mr. Trump, in which he said that “I understand that there is a heated fight underway” within the Supreme Court, was referring only to published reports he had read, and not to any inside information.

He provided only one example, an article from Vision Times, an obscure site associated with Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement opposed to the Chinese Communist Party that is known for publications that advance right-wing misinformation.

“I can categorically confirm that at no time did I discuss with Mrs. Thomas or Justice Thomas any matters pending or likely to come before the court,” Mr. Eastman wrote. “We have never engaged in such discussions, would not engage in such discussions and did not do so in December 2020 or anytime else.”

Mr. Eastman’s legal advice was the basis for an intense pressure campaign by Mr. Trump that was directed at Vice President Mike Pence, in the hope he would reject electors from contested states in his role overseeing Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6.

That advice was assailed on Thursday at the House committee’s hearing by J. Michael Luttig, a conservative and former federal appeals court judge for whom Mr. Eastman also once clerked. Mr. Luttig repudiated Mr. Eastman, saying that had his advice been followed, it would have been “tantamount to a revolution” and “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”

The connection between Mr. Eastman and the Thomases has been attracting attention for more than a year. In January 2021, in the wake of the Capitol riot, Mr. Eastman referred to his legal work for Mr. Trump on a private electronic forum used by former Thomas clerks, and by Ms. Thomas.

“Rest assured that those of us involved in this are working diligently to ascertain the truth,” Mr. Eastman wrote at the time. He invited other clerks “interested in more information” to get in touch.

That prompted another former Thomas clerk, Stephen F. Smith, a Notre Dame professor, to reply that he hoped everyone agreed “that the search for truth doesn’t in any way justify insurrection, trying to kidnap and assassinate elected officials, attacking police officers or making common cause with racists and anti-Semites.” The exchanges were later leaked.

For Ms. Thomas, a string of revelations over the past year has shown that she actively supported and participated at the highest levels in efforts to overturn the election.

In addition to her text messages, The Times Magazine reported on her role on the board of C.N.P. Action, a conservative group deeply involved in efforts to thwart Mr. Biden’s victory. The Post reported this month that she reached out to a number of lawmakers in Arizona for aid in overturning the election.

Her actions have cast a spotlight on her husband, who has issued opinions favoring Mr. Trump’s efforts to both reverse his loss and stymie the House investigation into the events of Jan. 6.

The Jan. 6 committee’s letter sought a number of documents from Ms. Thomas, including those delving into any “plans, efforts or discussions” on challenging the election, communications to legislatures in swing states or records relating to Mr. Pence’s role in counting electoral votes. Ms. Thomas indicated a willingness to speak to the committee, saying in comments to The Daily Caller that she “can’t wait to clear up misconceptions.”

Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Pence has moved on, and is laying the ground for a 2024 presidential run.

“I have been very moved, traveling around the country, how much people have made a point to express appreciation,” Mr. Pence said. “It has been very humbling to me.”

Mr. Pence, known for almost the entirety of the Trump presidency as a cautious No. 2 who never publicly contradicted his boss, ultimately resisted the intense pressure campaign by Mr. Trump and several of his allies to insert himself into the typically routine process of overseeing the certification of the Electoral College on Jan. 6.

His unwillingness to go along prompted abuse from Mr. Trump and his followers, some of whom chanted “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — a sentiment to which Mr. Trump is reported to have reacted approvingly.

For a time, the two somewhat patched things up, holding a series of genial phone calls. But within a few months of leaving office, Mr. Trump began attacking Mr. Pence again for not doing what he wanted, claiming that the vice president had power that Mr. Pence and several legal experts have insisted he did not.

In response, Mr. Pence broke publicly with Mr. Trump. “President Trump is wrong,” Mr. Pence said in February.

“The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone,” Mr. Pence said. “And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

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Who is John Wood, the Jan. 6 committee’s investigative lawyer?

Mr. Wood is a close associate of Representative Liz Cheney, one of the two Republican members of the committee. He also worked as a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, widely considered one of the most consistently conservative members of the Supreme Court, and held other roles within the Bush administration, including chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.

The committee has relied on Mr. Wood’s conservative bona fides to help frame its investigation as a nonpartisan effort not motivated by politics or vendettas against Mr. Trump.

“The committee will continue to put politics aside to get answers the American people deserve about what happened and how to ensure it never happens again,” the committee said in its September announcement of Mr. Wood’s role.

Before joining committee, Mr. Wood most recently worked as general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

His involvement with the committee has included overseeing the team scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s direct involvement in the riot.

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Judge who had advised Pence says following Trump’s orders would have risked ‘a revolution within a constitutional crisis.’

Judge Luttig spoke in relation to the intense pressure campaign on Mr. Pence by Mr. Trump and his allies, who pushed the vice president to insert himself into the certification of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6 to prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr. from being declared the winner.

Judge Luttig consulted with a lawyer for Mr. Pence, who had aides gathering information to affirm his belief that he did not have the authority to do what Mr. Trump wanted. Judge Luttig testified that had Mr. Pence complied, it would have set up a volatile situation.

“There was no support whatsoever in either the constitution of the United States or the laws of the United States for the vice president, frankly, ever to count alternative electoral slates from the states that had not been officially certified by the designated state official in the Electoral Count Act of 1887,” Judge Luttig said.

He was evaluating claims made by John Eastman, a conservative lawyer and former law clerk to Judge Luttig who was advising Mr. Trump. Mr. Eastman insisted that Mr. Pence could unilaterally decide not to count votes from states whose tallies were disputed.

In his opening statement, Judge Luttig — who weighed his words very carefully, speaking extremely slowly — described the events of Jan. 6, 2021, as a having driven a stake “through the heart of American democracy.”

“Our democracy today is on a knife’s edge,” he said. “America was at war on that fateful day, but not against a foreign power. She was at war against herself. We Americans were at war with each other — over our democracy. Jan. 6 was but the next, foreseeable battle in a war that had been raging in America for years, though that day was the most consequential battle of that war even to date.”

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