Jan. 6 is a story that keeps unspooling. There are layers and layers and we keep finding out more. Jonathan Karl’s new book, Betrayal, is a treasure trove of revealing details.
Our former president was obsessed with staying in power. As Karl shows, his coup attempt went deeper than has been recognized. Much planning, especially by lawyers, went into the coup effort.
We recently learned that not only Trump lawyer John Eastman had a blueprint for a coup but so did Jenna Ellis, a promoter of biblical law and another member of the Trump legal team. Ellis’s memo was very much like Eastman’s.
Ellis saw Vice President Mike Pence as potentially the key Jan. 6 actor. Ellis believes that the vice president has unilateral power as president of the Senate to decline to count electors sent to Congress by the states. She wanted Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electoral votes from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Her notion was very outside the traditional view that the constitutionally prescribed role of vice presidents is ceremonial during the electoral vote count. Ellis’s memo argued that Pence should halt the Electoral College vote count on Jan. 6 and give until Jan. 15 for states to send a new set of votes. If no new votes arrived by Jan. 15, Ellis argued those states’ votes would not be counted.
At that point, with no candidate having 270 electoral votes, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives pursuant to the 12th Amendment. Because...
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