WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump's theory that Vice President Mike Pence could have effectively deemed Trump the winner of the 2020 election is legally baseless and amounts to "constitutional mischief," retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told the Jan. 6 committee Thursday.
Trump and his legal adviser John Eastman repeatedly claimed that Pence had the power to reject electoral votes or suspend the electoral count temporarily while some states looked for evidence of fraud, possibly handing the election to Trump. That idea has "no theory or basis in the Constitution or laws in the United States at all," Luttig, who was appointed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President George H.W. Bush, told the committee.
"I would lay my body across the road before I would let the vice president overturn the 2020 election" on the basis of Eastman's theory, Luttig said. "What this body needs to know, and now America needs to know, is that that was the centerpiece to overturn the 2020 election."
