A lawyer working with former President Donald Trump's election legal team worked behind the scenes with former Vice President Mike Pence to create ways he could overturn the 2020 election.
The new book
Peril by reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa has revealed that there was a six-stage plan in a
two-page memo showing Pence how to subvert the Constitution and invalidate the 2020 election,
CNN reported.
The book, which comes out Tuesday, cited lawyer John Eastman's guide that was sent to top Republican Trump allies like Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), while Rudy Giuliani targeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to argue the case. Graham laughed at him, Woodward and Costa write.
"You might as well make your case to Queen Elizabeth II. Congress can't do this. You're wasting your time," Lee told Trump's lawyer.
The plan was that Pence would throw out the election results in seven states that Biden won because there were "competing electors."
There weren't actually any competing electors from any of the states, as the
New York Times reported in December. There were attempts in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan but none of the efforts worked.
"A group of people who gather in a room and claim they are electors, as state-party-backed Republicans did in a few states on Monday, have no more authority than if the people reading this article decided that they, too, wanted to be members of the Electoral College," said the
Times.
There was an effort to do that in Michigan, but Republican Senate Majority
Mike Shirkey refused.
"Michigan law does not include a provision for the Legislature to directly select electors or to award electors to anyone other than the person who received the most votes," his spokesperson said in a statement at the time.
The plot from Eastman would have Pence declare Trump the winner after those states were thrown out. He would then say that no candidates reached 270 votes and he would then throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state would get a vote. Since Republicans control 26 state delegations they would hand the election to Trump.
Eastman pitched the plan to Pence in the Oval Office on Jan. 4 with Trump.
"You really need to listen to John. He's a respected constitutional scholar. Hear him out," Trump said to Pence.
"The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission -- either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court," Eastman wrote. "The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind."
Pence obviously didn't go through with it. He instead
reached out to former Vice President Dan Quayle, who told him that there was no room for him to overturn the election.
