Trump White House attorneys called plan to overturn election ‘completely crazy’

‘Al Gore did not have a basis to do it in 2000. Kamala Harris shouldn’t be able to do it in 2024. But I think you should do it today’

Donald Trump’s own White House attorneys called the plan to overturn the 2020 election “completely crazy” and “nutty”, according to interviews with the House Select Committee investigating January 6.

Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann said he told conservative lawyer John Eastman, who pushed the idea that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the election, “hold on a second, I want to understand what you’re saying. You’re saying that you believe that the vice president, acting as president of the Senate, can be the sole decision-maker in who becomes the next president of the United States?”

“He said yes,” Mr Herschmann added. “I said, ‘are you out of your effing mind?’ That was pretty blunt. I said, ‘are you completely crazy?’ You’re going to turn around and tell 78 plus million people in this country that you are, this is your theory, this is how you’re going to invalidate their votes? Because you think the election was stolen? They’re not going to tolerate that, you’re going to cause riots in the streets’. He said ... ‘there has been violence in the history of our country to protect the democracy, to protect the republic’”.

Trump campaign official Jason Miller also told the committee that White House counsel Pat Cipollone thought the plan to have Mr Pence attempt to change the outcome of the election was “nutty”.

Mr Miller said Mr Cipollone had “confronted Eastman with the same sentiment”.

“It made no sense to me, that in all the protections that were built into the constitution for a president to get elected and steps that have to be taken ... to choose the next president would be sitting with the Vice President,” Mr Herschmann told the committee.

Mr Miller said two other members of Mr Trump’s election legal team thought Dr Eastman was “crazy”. The campaign adviser said he heard others say that Dr Eastman’s theory was “crazy” and “that there was no validity to it in any way, shape or form”. Mr Miller said these views were expressed before January 6 to “anyone who would listen”.

Greg Jacob, a former counsel to Mr Pence, told the committee that Dr Eastman admitted to Mr Trump on 4 January 2021 that the pressure campaign against Mr Pence was against the law.

On Thursday, Mr Jacob told the committee that Dr Eastman told him that “Al Gore did not have a basis to do it in 2000. Kamala Harris shouldn’t be able to do it in 2024. But I think you should do it today”.