Jan. 6 hearing: Trump remains 'clear and present danger' to American democracy, retired GOP judge tells panel

Retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, who advised the former vice president in the buildup to the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, told the House committee investigating the attack that Trump and his allies remain a "clear and present danger" to U.S. democracy.

Luttig, a Republican, warned the committee that Trump remains a danger because the former president has pledged to contest the next election for the White House in 2024 if Republicans don't win.

"That's not because of what happened on January 6th," Luttig said. "It's because to this very day the former president, his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate, were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election."

Trump has not ruled out running for president again in 2024 after losing to President Joe Biden two years ago.

— Brian Schwartz

Trump attorney John Eastman, who pushed for Pence to reject the 2020 election results, told former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that he wanted to be added to the list of presidential pardon recipients.

"I've decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works," Eastman wrote, according to a screenshot of the email displayed during the panel's third hearing.

The email to Giuliani, who had helped spread an array of false election-fraud conspiracies, came days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the committee said.

The email also came after a conversation with White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, who said he told Eastman on Jan. 7, 2021, "I'm going to give you the best free legal advice you're ever getting in your life: get a great effing criminal defense lawyer, you're going to need it."

Eastman did not receive a pardon from Trump. The committee played a video clip of Eastman being questioned by the committee, showing the lawyer pleading his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination numerous times.

Eastman ultimately pleaded the Fifth 100 times, Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said.

— Kevin Breuninger

The former vice president was within almost 40 feet of rioters on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, as the president initially failed to deescalate the mob of Trump supporters from attacking the Capitol, according to Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif.

Aguilar, a member of the House Select Committee investigating that attack on the Capitol, testified that Pence's life was in danger during the riot.

"Make no mistake about the fact that the vice president's life was in danger. A recent court filing by the Department of Justice explains that a confidential informant from the Proud Boys told the FBI the Proud Boys would have killed Mike Pence if given a chance," Aguilar said during Thursday's hearing.

Despite the threat on his life, Pence's former legal advisor Greg Jacob told the committee that the vice president refused to leave the Capitol.

"The Vice President did not want to take any chance that the world would see the Vice President of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol," Jacob said.

— Brian Schwartz

Trump attacked his own vice president as a "wimp" in a tense phone call with Pence on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, witnesses told the select committee.

"The conversation was, was pretty heated," said Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, who was in the Oval Office along with others who witnessed Trump's call with Pence.

"It was a different tone than I had heard him take with the vice president before," Ivanka Trump said.

"I remember hearing the word 'wimp,'" Trump's former assistant Nicholas Luna said he heard the president say at the tail end of the call. "'Wimp' is the word I remember."

Gen. Keith Kellogg, Pence's former national security advisor, told the committee he heard Trump say words to the effect of, "You're not tough enough to make the call."

Ivanka's former chief of staff, Julia Radford, said that Trump's daughter told her after the call that the president had called Pence "the P word."

— Kevin Breuninger

John Eastman, a lawyer advising former President Donald Trump, "never really believed his own theory" that then-Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally make a decisive impact on the outcome of the 2020 race, a select committee member said.

Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., displayed a draft letter to Trump dated October 2020, in which a theory was floated that, under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, the vice president could decide which electoral votes to count.

But that idea was undercut in the same letter by Eastman, who wrote in blue text: "Nowhere does it suggest that the President of the Senate gets to make the determination on his own."

Aguilar displayed the screenshot of the letter after Greg Jacob, former counsel to Pence, testified to the panel that Eastman admitted one day before the Capitol riot that the theory would be rejected 9-0 if it went before the Supreme Court.

— Kevin Breuninger

Former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said that multiple officials, including former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, had strong doubts about the theory that Pence had the power to decide the election — and said so prior to Jan. 6.

"The way it was communicated to me was that Pat Cipollone thought the idea was nutty and had at one point confronted [Trump lawyer John Eastman] with the same sentiment," Miller told the committee in an interview clip played during the hearing.

Other officials close to Trump thought Eastman's theory "was crazy," Miller said in the taped clip. Two of them said that "there was no validity to it in any way, shape or form" prior to the Capitol riot, and would tell "anyone who would listen," Miller said.

— Kevin Breuninger

Retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, who advised Vice President Mike Pence ahead of the Capitol riot, directly accused former President Donald Trump and his allies of waging a "war on democracy" on Jan. 6, 2021.

"Our democracy today is on a knife's edge," Luttig, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, said in a blistering witness statement shared with CNBC by the select committee.

Luttig, one of two witnesses to speak during the committee's third public hearing, excoriated efforts by Trump and other to overturn the 2020 election, saying that "treacherous plan was no less ambitious than to steal America's democracy."

Luttig's sweeping, damning speech slammed Trump for spreading false election-fraud conspiracies to claim he won the election, which he lost "fair and square" to President Joe Biden. And Luttig said it was "breathtaking" that Trump entertained meritless legal theories that were employed to try to reverse his election loss.

The former judge, who was appointed to the U.S. appeals court by Republican former President George H.W. Bush, also took aim at the GOP itself. "The former president's party cynically and embarrassingly rationalizes January 6 as having been something between hallowed, legitimate public discourse and a visitors tour of the Capitol that got out of hand," he said. "January 6, of course, was neither, and the former president and his party know that."

Luttig also defended Pence, who rejected Trump's demand that he refuse to count electoral votes for Joe Biden. "There were many cowards on the battlefield on January 6. The Vice President was not among them," Luttig said.

— Kevin Breuninger

Former Vice President Mike Pence's counsel Greg Jacob said "there was no way" that Pence had the legal authority to refuse to count electoral votes and, essentially, select the winner of the presidential election.

Jacob told the committee he first talked to Pence about the legal theory in in the month after the 2020 election, after the then-vice president to Trump started hearing and reading claims that he had a significant role to play on Jan. 6, 2021.

After looking at the relevant provision in the Constitution's 12th Amendment, as well as the 19th-Century Electoral Count Act, Jacob and others found that the theory held no weight.

"We concluded that what you have is a sentence in the Constitution that is inartfully drafted," Jacob said. "But the vice president's first instinct when he heard this theory was that there was no way that our framers, who abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George the Third, would ever have put one person — particularly not a person who had a direct interest in the outcome, because they were on the ticket for the election — in a role to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the election."

"Our review of text, history and, frankly, just common sense, all confirmed the vice president's first instinct on that point," Jacob said. "There is no justifiable basis to conclude that the vice president has that kind of authority."

— Kevin Breuninger

Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said that the U.S. is "fortunate for Mr. Pence's courage on January 6," when the then-vice president refused Trump's calls for him to reject Electoral College votes.

Trump "wanted Pence to reject the votes and either declare Trump the winner or send the votes back to the states to be counted again," Thompson said at the start of the hearing. "Mike Pence said no."

"Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe. That courage put [Pence] in tremendous danger" when Trump "turned the mob on him," Thompson said.

— Kevin Breuninger

The select committee is expected to feature a mix of live witnesses and pre-taped interviews like the first two hearings, with two of Pence's former advisors scheduled to testify in person.

The committee's chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and its vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., are also expected to speak. Cheney suggested last week that the actions of attorney John Eastman, who was advising Trump on the election, will play a prominent role in the hearing.

Two associates of Pence are slated to testify in person on Thursday. The first is Greg Jacob, former counsel to the vice president, who in an email on the day of the riot told Eastman, "Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege."

The other witness is J. Michael Luttig, a retired judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit who had been an informal advisor to Pence in the lead-up to Jan. 6.

Committee member Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., is expected to take a lead in Thursday's hearing.

— Kevin Breuninger

Select committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., revealed that the panel will ask Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to speak with congressional investigators.

Ginni Thomas has come under intense scrutiny in recent months following reporting on her efforts to challenge the 2020 election results — including by sending a series of frantic texts to then-President Donald Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows.

"We think it's time that we would, at some point, invite her to come talk to the committee," Thompson told a group of journalists Thursday morning, NBC News and other outlets reported.

Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., agrees that the committee should talk to Ginni Thomas, a Cheney aide told CNBC.

The forthcoming invitation is based on "information we have come upon" about the conservative justice's spouse, Thompson reportedly said. He did not specify when the committee planned to send its invitation.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

— Kevin Breuninger

Select committee aides told reporters on Wednesday afternoon that the latest hearing will delve into one of Trump's theories — rejected by most top legal minds and ultimately by Pence himself — that the vice president could unilaterally refuse to count Electoral College votes from disputed states.

Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, was tasked with presiding over a joint session of Congress to confirm the Electoral College results. He stoked Trump's fury when he said in a letter just before the proceedings that he cannot claim "unilateral authority" to throw out electoral votes.

The nine-member committee will plans to show how Trump heaped pressure on Pence to follow this theory, and how that helped stoke the Capitol riot and "put Pence's life in danger," an aide said. The panel is also expected to unveil new material documenting Pence's moves at the Capitol as the insurrection was unfolding.

— Kevin Breuninger