Your Evening Briefing: Conservative Legal Icon Calls Trump ‘Clear and Present Danger’

The bipartisan Congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection turned its attention on Thursday to former Vice President Mike Pence, whose central role in preventing what the committee called an attempted coup by Donald Trump echoed across much of the day’s testimony. The hearing depicted an increasingly ominous campaign by Trump to pressure Pence to illegally block the transfer of power to Joe Biden. Evidence presented by committee members illustrated with stark detail the alleged violent intent of some Trump followers—stirred up by Trump’s speech and social media postings—and how on Jan. 6 some came within 40 feet of Pence as he fled. But just as darkly, testimony by Greg Jacob, who was Pence’s chief counsel, and J. Michael Luttig, a conservative legal icon and former federal appellate judge, focused on another man—Trump lawyer John Eastman. Eastman was one of the alleged architects of what the committee called Trump’s plan to stay in power, proposing ways in which Pence could violate the Constitution to Trump’s benefit, witnesses said. (Eastman repeatedly invoked his right against self-incrimination at his deposition.) As the hearing ended, Luttig—who called Trump a “clear and present danger” to American democracy—was asked to reflect on what lay ahead. His response: “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 they attempted to overturn the 2020 election—but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”

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