Jim Acosta Reports Trump Threatened Pence After Being Told VP Wouldn’t Overturn Electoral College: ‘It Could Be Politically Damaging’ for You

Reed RichardsonJan 5th, 2021, 10:33 pm
 

CNN’s chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta reported that Donald Trump issued a implicit threat to his own vice president after Mike Pence told the president in a private meeting on Tuesday that he did not have the authority to dismiss or overturn state electors on January 6th. This would close the last door on Trump’s increasingly desperate gambits to somehow reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s certified victory.

Appearing during the Election Night coverage of the Georgia senate runoffs, Acosta told anchor Jake Tapper that Trump was reportedly very frustrated that Pence recognized that the 12th Amendment does not grant him the authority to summarily override the will of the voters in the states. Earlier on Tuesday evening, ABC News’ Jon Karl reported that Pence will “defy” Trump’s entreaties and instead follow his Constitutional duties to certify Biden’s win.

“One of the headwinds you hear when you talk to Georgia Republicans is that for the last nine or ten weeks they have had to deal with the fact that President Trump has been fanning the flames of conspiracy theories because he’s unable to accept the fact that he lost the presidential race,” Tapper noted.

“What we’re hearing is that this was a tense meeting between the president and vice president,” Acosta told Tapper. “I’m told by a source familiar with this meeting that when the vice president told the president he does not have to authority to block certification of President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory that the president told the vice president that it could be politically damaging for the vice president to fail to block this certification tomorrow. The word I’m told is damaging, that the president relayed to the vice president should the vice president decide to go ahead and allow this process to go forward tomorrow.”

Acosta added that Pence was advised by the White House counsel’s office that he does not have the authority to follow through on Trump’s demand for what would be essentially an administrative coup.

“This played out to be quite an intense meeting,” Acosta added. “This doesn’t mean Mike pence is going to go up to capitol hill and robotically preside over the proceedings. I talked to a senior trump campaign adviser earlier today who said Mike pence is not going to be a wall flower. He is going to indicate he understands the president’s concerns. According to the adviser Mike pence shares the president’s concerns but at this point, Constitutionally people around the president, even people inside the campaign believe, there is not much Mike Pence can do at this point.”

The Trump campaign, however, issued a strong denial of the these accounts of president’s private meeting with his vice president in a Tuesday night statement, claiming that Trump and Pence are in “total agreement” on the vice president’s ability to “decertify the results or send them back to the states for change and certification.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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