The man who advised former vice president Mike Pence to help him push back on attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results will tell the select committee investigating the January 6 riot at the Capitol a simple message: “The law is not a plaything for presidents.”
Greg Jacob served as Mr Pence’s counsel during his vice presidency and his statement leaked to Politico ahead of the committee’s third day of hearings.
“The vice president’s first instinct was that the Framers of our Constitution, who abhorred concentrated power, would never have entrusted any one person with the unilateral authority to alter the outcome of a presidential election--particularly not a person who is on the ticket”, he said in his statement. “The vice president never wavered from that view.”
Mr Jacob said that he began speaking with Mr Pence about the Electoral Count Act and the 12th Amendment, both of which govern certifying the winner of the Electoral College, in December 2020, as former president Donald Trump continued to promote his lie that the election was stolen. This was also when the White House began pressuring Mr Pence.
“Our office was determined that no one would ever be able to say that the vice president’s conclusion about the limits of his constitutional authority was a result of a failure to examine relevant law, history or practice”, he wrote.
Both ahead of and during the day of the cetification of the Electoral College results, Mr Trump and his legal team, including attorney John C Eastman, repeatedly pressured Mr Pence to use his authority to overturn the results. Mr Eastman famously concocted the memo that would lay out the way he would do so.
Mr Jacob said that while the committee is currently weighing remedies to ensure there is never another crisis, he countered that the current laws in place are already sufficient.
“The truth is, however, that our enacted laws were already clear that the vice president did not possess the extraordinary powers others urged upon him”, Mr Jacob wrote.
“The law is not a plaything for presidents or judges to use to remake the world in their preferred image”, Mr Jacob wrote. “Our Constitution and our laws form the strong edifice within which our heartfelt policy disagreements are to be debated and decided.”
