NEW: Trump Called Top Officials on Jan 6. in Desperate Last Minute Effort to Overturn Election
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
A report on Donald Trump’s last days in office is providing new details on how the former president called his surrogates and instructed them to do anything they could to stop Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results.
The Guardian reports that hours before Trump’s supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, the president called Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Steve Bannon as his allies huddled together at the Willard hotel in Washington. Sources say Trump made several calls to his allies in order to tell them Vice President Mike Pence wasn’t on board with his demand to not certify the election, so he was asking them to find other options to stop the process.
“On the calls, the former president first recounted what had transpired in the Oval Office meeting with Pence, informing Bannon and the lawyers at the Willard that his vice-president appeared ready to abandon him at the joint session in several hours’ time,” the article states. “On at least one of those calls, Trump also sought from the lawyers at the Willard ways to stop the joint session to ensure Biden would not be certified as president on 6 January, as part of a wider discussion about buying time to get states to send Trump electors.
The report goes on to say Trump and his allies arrived at a plan to persuade Republican members of Congress to raise enough objections to the certification that the process would be delayed even without Pence’s help.
“It was not clear whether Trump discussed on the call about the prospect of stopping Biden’s certification by any means if Pence refused to insert himself into the process,” the article noted, “but the former president is said to have enjoyed watching the insurrection unfold from the dining room.”
The Guardian article also corroborates recent reports about how Eastman tried to establish a plan for Pence to enact Trump’s orders and overturn the election during certification. He was secretly caught on video recently as he defended the scheme he tried to put forward to Pence.
Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington claimed the report on Trump’s call was “totally false,” though she refused to base her objections on any specifics. If the report is true that the ex-president specifically instructed his surrogates do whatever they could to halt the certification, it’s likely to be a subject of inquiry for ongoing investigations into their culpability for the storming of the Capitol.
