Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative who served as an informal adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, testified before the Jan. 6 select committee on Thursday that Pence would have led a “revolution within a constitutional crisis” if he followed then-President Trump’s order to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair of the Jan. 6 panel, asked Luttig to elaborate on a statement he made prior to the start of Thursday’s hearing in which the former judge said that if Pence obeyed Trump’s plea, the U.S. “would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”
Luttig, after underscoring the importance of the rule of law in the U.S., said Pence would have led the U.S. to its first-ever constitutional crisis if he followed the president’s request and declared Trump the winner of the presidential election.
“That declaration of Donald Trump as the next president would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America, which in my view, and I’m only one man, would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic,” Luttig testified.
The Jan. 6 panel is focused at its Thursday hearing on the pressure campaign on Pence.