FORTY-FOUR
Trump woke up early on January 6, tweeting and demanding Pence reject the electoral votes.
“All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN,” Trump tweeted at 8:17 a.m. “Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”
Marc Short and Greg Jacob joined Pence that morning at 9 a.m. to finalize the letter.
Jacob had worked on the letter for weeks. A former partner in O’Melveny & Myers’s Washington office, he was a Federalist Society member and steeped in conservative legal doctrine.
Early in the process, Jacob had reached out to conservative lawyer John Yoo at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught. Yoo had sterling credentials in conservative legal circles. An alum of George W. Bush’s Justice Department, he was the author of the “torture memos,” which provided a legal basis for torturing detainees in the war on terror and had also been a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.
“My view is that Vice President Pence has no discretion anymore. It’s not something to worry about or even think about,” Yoo told Jacob. “I feel bad for your boss because he’s going to have an angry employer” in Trump.
Jacob kept seeking out advice. He called Richard Cullen, a former United States attorney in Virginia, who had signed on as Pence’s personal lawyer in 2017 during the probes into Russian election interference. He agreed with Yoo.
At dawn on January 6, Cullen called J. Michael Luttig, a retired former federal judge popular on the right. Years ago, Luttig had hired John Eastman as his law clerk. His opinion could be a powerful tool for the vice president.
“Today is the day,” Cullen said. “I’ve been asked to ask you, ‘Is there any way you can help?’ ”
“When does he need something?” Luttig asked.
“Immediately,” Cullen said.
“You can tell the vice president that I believe he has to certify the Electoral College vote today,” Luttig said. He then started to type out a statement on his iPhone, sitting in his den in the dark.
Luttig sent it to Cullen, and it went straight into Pence’s letter.
Cabinet officers held a Principals Meeting without President Trump for 30 minutes at 9:30 a.m. on January 6. New and sensitive intelligence reporting from overseas that morning seemed to be worrisome, but once it was run down, tensions eased in the room.
Cabinet members were briefed on Trump’s scheduled rally at the Ellipse. Traffic points to control the crowds were set up. The Guard, in orange vests and no helmets, would augment the Metropolitan Police.
Milley said he expected a routine day, at least in terms of security threats. Trump had held countless rallies that were rowdy, but never crises.
President Trump called Pence around 10 a.m. on January 6 as Pence met with Short and Jacob. Pence excused himself to take the call upstairs, alone.
“I’m heading to the Capitol soon,” Pence told Trump. “I told you I’d sleep on it, I’d take a look with my team. We’ll hear any objections and evidence. But when I go to the Capitol, I’ll do my job.”
“Mike, this is not right!” Trump said, calling from the Oval Office. “Mike, you can do this. I’m counting on you to do it. If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago.”
As Trump kept pushing Pence, the president’s body man, Nick Luna, entered and handed the president a note. They were ready for him at the rally outside. His people were waiting.
“You’re going to wimp out!” Trump said. His anger was visible to others in the Oval Office, including his daughter Ivanka.
She turned to Keith Kellogg.
“Mike Pence is a good man,” Ivanka Trump said to Kellogg.
“I know that,” Kellogg said.
He later worked hard to make sure Ivanka’s sympathy for Pence was widely reported.
Before Trump took the stage on January 6, Giuliani used militaristic language in his own rally remarks.
“Let’s have trial by combat,” he said, as the crowd hooted their approval.
They were bundled up in heavy coats, but ecstatic. Homemade signs. Red Trump caps. “Save America March” read the screens onstage. Trump’s family members and aides were gathered backstage, giddy.
“This is incredible,” President Trump said shortly before noon, as he looked out at thousands.
“Media will not show the magnitude of this crowd,” Trump said. “Turn your cameras please and show what’s really happening out here because these people are not going to take it any longer. They’re not going to take it any longer.”
Like Giuliani, he was all fight.
“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he said. “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Just before 1 p.m., Trump made one last try for Pence to submit and do his bidding.
“Mike Pence, I hope you’re going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you. I will tell you right now. I’m not hearing good stories.”
Pence released his two-page letter shortly before 1 p.m., and then tweeted it at 1:02 p.m. He and his team did not share it with Meadows or White House counsel Pat Cipollone beforehand.
“As a student of history who loves the Constitution and reveres its Framers, I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress, and no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such authority,” Pence wrote.
The letter finished with a short oath: “So Help Me God.”
Following Trump’s hour-long speech, thousands of attendees took his advice. They marched down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, and when they arrived, they found small groups of Capitol Police officers gathered near waist-height barriers and bike-rack-like fencing.
They jumped over the racks and surged closer and closer to the Capitol, despite pleas from the officers.
By 1:30 p.m., parts of the crowd had become a mob, pounding on the doors and demanding entry. At 1:50 p.m., Robert Glover, the Metropolitan Police’s on-scene commander, declared a riot. Possible pipe bombs had just been found nearby.
Shortly after 2 p.m., windows at the Capitol began to shatter. They were in. Many were looking for Mike Pence. “Hang Mike Pence!” they chanted as they roamed the halls. “Bring out Mike Pence! Where is Pence? Find him!” Outside, a makeshift gallows had been erected.
When Capitol Police approached Speaker Pelosi in the House chamber, she initially dismissed their attempt to pull her away. She was in charge. She was prepared to sit through a long afternoon of listening to Republican gripes. It would be embarrassing for the nation, political theater, but it was her duty to endure it.
The building has been breached, they told her. We need to get you out of here.
“You have to leave.”
“No, I’m not leaving.”
“No, you must leave.”
She finally agreed.
Nearby, inside the House chamber, Capitol Police officers were leaning down and whispering the same to Jim Clyburn. He couldn’t believe it. He flashed a dubious look at his agents: Wasn’t the House floor supposed to be the safest place in America?
Surrounding her in a protective hive, Pelosi’s security detail rushed her off the floor. So did Clyburn’s detail, which whisked him out a door where Capitol rioter and Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt would soon be shot and killed by a police officer. They hustled Clyburn down more steps. He had been in Congress since 1993 and was the third-ranking House member, but he had never known this area existed. They helped him into his SUV, his “truck,” as he called it.
“We can’t take you home,” an agent told him. “We’ve been instructed to take you to this undisclosed location.”
After a five-minute drive, Pelosi and Clyburn, traveling separately, arrived at Fort Lesley J. McNair, a small, secure U.S. Army post a few blocks from the Washington Nationals’ baseball stadium. A caravan of black vehicles. It was raining. They stepped out and went inside.
Pelosi thought of her colleagues and staff—and her late father, who had served in the House decades ago representing Baltimore. He had watched Winston Churchill speak in the chamber. She knew he would have been horrified by the scene. It was un-American.
She called her staff. They were hiding and crouched under tables. They barricaded the door and turned out the lights and were silent in the dark.
Rioters eventually made their way into her office, stealing her papers and other personal items. They ransacked her second-floor workspace, gleefully taking pictures on their phones and putting their feet on her desk.
“Where’s the speaker?” some screamed. “Find her!”
Clyburn called his staff. They were in his private office with heavy furniture pushed in front of the door. There are people attempting to force themselves into the office, the terrified aides said.
Clyburn was alarmed. Was he being targeted? Was this an inside job? His private office was all but unmarked. Why hadn’t the rioters gone to his public office that had his name plate on the door? How do they know this location?
The rioters broke more windows and a mirror. Shards of glass littered the floor.
“This was an act of violence,” Pelosi told others at McNair. “Not just troublemakers picketing. An act of violence.”
McConnell was listening to Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma speak when he noticed security piling into the Senate chamber. Within moments, an agent with an assault rifle was next to him. He, too, headed to McNair.
McConnell called Milley.
“We need the Guard in. Now,” he said.
He spoke with Pence, who also had been guided out of the Senate chamber.
“We are looking for help. We need help in securing the building,” McConnell said, “and we need to get these clowns out of the place.”
McConnell found the law enforcement response disturbingly slow.
Meadows called McConnell several times, promising to be helpful, and gave the Department of Defense the leader’s cell phone number so McConnell could be in direct contact.
At McNair, McConnell instructed his chief of staff, Sharon Soderstrom, to find the Democrats. Democrats and Republicans were in separate areas. He was worried that the rattled Capitol Police might try to delay their return to the Capitol after it was cleared.
“Find out where they are and tell them no matter what,” McConnell said. “We are coming in tonight. I want to do it in prime time, so the country sees us back and we’re going to finish the counting of the electoral votes.
“It’s important that the public, in prime time, know the assault had failed,” he said.
McConnell had grown up in the Capitol. In the summer of 1964, he interned in the Senate. He loved the place. This was his office. His home.