Ex-Trump, Pence Senior Staffer Tears Trump’s Defense of Pressure Campaign on VP Apart: ‘Absurd On Its Face’
Marc Short, who served as legislative director in Donald Trump’s White House and later as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff through the end of the Trump-Pence administration, systematically debunked a defense of Trump’s pressure campaign on Pence after the 2020 election on CNN Friday morning.
In an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program on Thursday night, John Lauro, an attorney for Trump, attempted to mount a defense of Trump’s asks of Pence on January 6, 2021.
“Ultimately, what President Trump said is: Let’s go with Option D. Let’s just halt, let’s just pause the voting and allow the state legislatures to take one last look and make a determination as to whether or not the elections were handled fairly. That’s constitutional law! That’s not an issue of criminal activity,” argued Lauro.
Asked by Kate Bolduan if the lawyer’s account was accurate, Short said it was “a very disingenuous summation.”
He went on to explain that Trump’s purpose was to overturn the results of the election:
The reality was that after the Electoral College met on December 14 and confirmed Joe Biden as the victor, then the pressure campaign turned to to Mike Pence. And throughout that, the effort all along was to say, “just reject the states in question, simply dismiss them out of hand.” The prosecution has notes from senior advisers to the president who said eventually, “look, it’s clear that Pence won’t go along with this. So perhaps we can pivot to this other cockamamie idea, which is we could just push a delay and ask him to return it.”
There’s no constitutional basis for the vice president have authority to unilaterally choose which states to send back. And obviously, we wouldn’t want Kamala Harris, if a Republican won, say Nevada, Wisconsin, to send back to Democrat state legislatures. And so it’s absurd on its face. But what’s really important here is that was not the pressure campaign. The pressure campaign was to reject him out of hand. That was a last minute pivot. That sounds better from a PR perspective, Kate. But the push was to say, “if there’s a delay, then what we’re forced constitutionally to do is turn this over to the House of Representatives to choose.” And the theory was then that the House of Representatives there, each state would get one vote, and there were 26 delegations controlled by Republicans and 24 by Democrats. So the purpose was the same.
But to illustrate the stupidity even of that is this notion that keep in mind in that point in Wisconsin, there’s one House Republican, so that one House Republican, Liz Cheney, was not going to vote for Donald Trump to be the president. So even if you follow that through, it didn’t make sense. But it was also the purpose of it all along was really it was really to say, have Pence just reject them out of hand. This has become a PR move to say all we are trying to do is get him to send it back to the States. There’s no process for doing that. And the purpose all along to say that would then push it back to the House of Representatives.
Trump faces four federal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Watch above via CNN.
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