Jan. 6 committee holds third hearing

On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Mike Pence's former attorney Greg Jacob said he was at the vice president's residence when he got a call from former President Donald Trump. Jacob testified that he and several other people were there finalizing Pence's statement which was set to be put out later that day.

He said Pence stepped out of the room to take the call from Trump and no staff went with him.

Although Jacob couldn't hear the conversation, the House select committee investigating the insurrection said Trump did have several family members with him in the Oval Office on the other line of the phone. The committee played a video that featured clips of testimony from several people who were in the room with Trump during that call.

"I think until it became somewhat of a louder tone, I don't think anyone was paying attention to it really," former White House attorney Eric Herschmann said.

Nicholas Luna, a former special assistant to Trump, said he was dropping off a note and remembered Trump calling Pence a “wimp.” 

Luna said he recalled something to the effect of Trump saying “I made the wrong decision four or five years ago.” 

And Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s former chief of staff, said she recalled Ivanka Trump telling her that “her dad had just had an upsetting conversation with the vice president.” It had not been publicly disclosed before that Radford spoke to the committee.

Radford said she was told that Trump had called Pence “the P-word,” referencing a derogatory term.

Watch full moment here:

CNN's Jeremy Herb contributed reporting to this post.

The Justice Department pressed the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot to turn over transcripts of witness interviews, noting that refusing to turn over the documents is leading to delays in the department’s efforts to investigate and prosecute criminal suspects involved in the attack on the Capitol. 

Prosecutors released a letter from top officials overseeing the department’s Jan. 6 criminal investigation to the committee’s chief investigative lawyer, as the committee’s third public hearing is unfolding on national television.

Prosecutors asked the committee in April for the access to about 1,000 witness transcripts that lawmakers so far have refused to provide. The delay has frustrated Justice Department officials, who have faced pressure from members of the Jan. 6 committee to move more quickly on politically sensitive prosecutions beyond the rioters. Justice officials say that the committee’s criticism of the department are in conflict with the committee’s own role in delaying some of prosecutors’ work. 

The letter added that “the select Committee’s failure to grant the Department access to these transcripts complicates the Department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct in relation to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”

The letter was released in a joint bid by prosecutors and two members of Proud Boys leadership to delay their trial, which is currently scheduled to begin in August, until December. 

The committee’s hearings have repeatedly mentioned the Proud Boys – including naming at least one defendant in this case, Joe Biggs – and has featured testimony from uncharged members of Proud Boys leadership. 

Prosecutors previously revealed that they learned the select committee was planning to release transcripts from their investigation in September, potentially coinciding with the trial of five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the riot. The Justice Department had already asked for the transcripts, Prosecutor Jason McCullough said earlier this month, but that those requests had been denied.

The judge in the case, Judge Timothy Kelly, said earlier this month that despite the committee’s public hearings, he did not believe the trial needed to be postponed and that what the committee does "is beyond the power of anyone around our table here today."

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol is back after taking a short break. 

The Jan. 6 committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol is taking a short break during its third public hearing this month. The panel is presenting evidence that it says shows former President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count 2020 electoral votes.

So far, the panel has heard live testimony from former Pence attorney Greg Jacob and retired Republican judge J. Michael Luttig.

The committee is focusing on Trump attorney John Eastman’s theory that the Vice President had the authority to overturn the election results.

Pence never believed he had the authority to unilaterally reject Electoral College votes, Jacob said in his testimony. He also said Eastman acknowledged to him that his theory would lose at the Supreme Court 9-0.

If you're just catching up now, here are the other key moments you might have missed:

Then-President Donald Trump lied to the press when — on the eve of Jan. 6, 2021 — he released a statement claiming then-Vice President Mike Pence supported his plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to testimony from a former senior Pence aide during the Jan. 6 committee hearing on Thursday.

Trump, Pence and other top aides met in the Oval Office on Jan. 5 to discuss the upcoming joint session of Congress, where lawmakers would formally certify Joe Biden’s victory. Pence and his team told Trump that there was nothing Pence could do during those proceedings to undo Trump’s defeat.

After the meeting, The New York Times reported about what happened. After the story was published, Trump put out a press release saying that “the Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.”

But that was a “false” statement that “misrepresented the Vice President’s viewpoint,” Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, said in a videotaped deposition, a clip of which was played Thursday. 

Short also said he was “irritated” by Trump’s statement and “expressed displeasure” during a heated phone call with Jason Miller, who was a senior spokesperson for the Trump campaign at the time.

Pence’s former top lawyer Greg Jacob testified that “we were shocked and disappointed” when they saw the statement, “because whoever had written and put that statement out, it was categorically untrue.”

Most of the statement was personally dictated by Trump, according to a clip of Miller’s testimony.

This was just one of thousands of false statements and lies that Trump publicly made throughout his presidency, according to fact-checkers who evaluated every utterance from his four years in office.

In a question that Jan. 6 committee member Rep. Pete Aguilar phrased to former Vice President Mike Pence's attorney Greg Jacob about a meeting between then-President Donald Trump, Pence, and conservative attorney John Eastman on Jan. 4, 2021, Aguilar revealed a key term of Jacob's agreement to testify — that he would not discuss the direct conversations between Trump and Pence.

Aguilar was asking Jacob — who served as chief counsel to Pence — about what was said in that January meeting, but acknowledged that Jacob would not answer any questions about what was said between Trump and Pence directly.

So instead, Aguilar phrased his question more broadly and asked Jacob whether Pence ever wavered in his position that he could not delay certification.  

Ivan Raiklin, the man mentioned by name during Thursday’s hearing as having posted a memo called the “Operation Pence Card,” is a known associate of former President Donald Trump’s one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The memo outlined a theory that the vice president could block certification of the election results on Jan. 6.

Raiklin has worked with Flynn and a group of other former military service members to spread various unfounded theories about how the 2020 election was compromised – an effort that began weeks before Jan. 6 and continued months after. 

They have also been heavily involved in efforts to file lawsuits and audits in various states challenging the election outcome. 

Raiklin first posted the “Pence Card” document on his social media accounts in mid-December 2020. 

Trump appeared to endorse the plan, retweeting one of Raiklin’s posts about the “Pence Card” on Dec. 23, 2020.

Raiklin posted his plan weeks before conservative attorney John Eastman drafted his own memo outlining a similar plan, which was embraced by Trump despite warnings it was not legally sound. 

Raiklin served as a Green Beret and at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has known Flynn for several years.

Former Vice President Mike Pence never believed he had the authority to unilaterally reject Electoral College votes, Pence's former chief counsel Greg Jacob testified to the House select committee on Thursday.

Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, told the committee in an earlier recorded deposition that Pence consulted with former Vice President Dan Quayle, who confirmed Pence’s view that he had only a ceremonial role in counting the Electoral College votes.

Former President Donald Trump's lawyer John Eastman said he did not believe other vice presidents, such as Al Gore after the 2000 election or Kamala Harris after the eventual 2024 election, could overturn elections — but he wanted former then-Vice President Mike Pence to do so, Pence's former counsel Greg Jacob told the Jan. 6 committee.

"This was one of the many points that we discussed on Jan. 5. [Eastman] had come into that meeting trying to persuade us that there was some validity to his theory. I viewed it as my objective to persuade him to acknowledge he was just wrong, and I thought this had to be one of the most powerful arguments," Jacob said.

Remember: No vice president has ever tried to overturn an election using the scheme that Eastman proposed, and his theories have been condemned as anti-democratic by a wide array of legal experts.

Previous vice presidents had to preside over the Electoral College process that cemented their defeats, like Richard Nixon did after the 1960 election and Al Gore after the 2000 election and Florida recount.