The House committee investigating the Capitol riot plans to focus its hearing Thursday on the pressure that Donald Trump put on his vice president, Mike Pence, in a last-ditch and potentially illegal plan to stop Joe Biden’s election victory. Trump seized on the unorthodox proposal from conservative law professor John Eastman to have Pence turn back the electors when the vice president presided over Congress to certify the election results on Jan. 6, 2021. Traditionally, Jan. 6 is a ceremonial day, a procedural step tallying the presidential vote. But Eastman’s highly unusual plan — “bold,” he called it — was to have alternative slates of electors submitted to Congress, leaving Pence no choice but to return them to the states to sort it out. Biden would be denied a majority and Trump could win. As the defeated Trump watched dozens of court cases challenging the 2020 presidential election collapse, he turned to the Eastman plan as a last resort to stay in office. “John (Eastman) is one of the most brilliant lawyers in the country and he looked at this,” Trump told thousands of supporters at a rally near the White House before sending them to the Capitol on Jan. 6. “And he looked at Mike Pence, and I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” the then-president said. The committee viewed it as a “grave, grave threat to democracy” according to a committee aide who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter before Thursday’s hearing. A look at the Eastman plan in the days before Jan. 6 and why it’s central to the congressional investigation: THE PLAN Two days before the Capitol attack, Pence was summoned to the White House for an Oval Office meeting with Trump and Eastman to hear about the law professor’s plan to turn back the electors. With Trump’s false claims of election fraud, Eastman had been circulating what was essentially an academic proposal challenging the workings of the 130-year-old Electoral Count Act that governs the process for tallying the election results in Congress. The six-point plan was gaining momentum among Trump’s allies in Congress, including key senators, and outside activists. “BOLD, Certainly,” Eastman said in a memo included in a court filing from the Jan. 6 committee. But he said such an unusual step was needed, falsely claiming “this Election was Stolen.” If Pence would refuse to count some electors, then the threshold needed to certify the presidential election would drop from the regular 270-vote majority to a lesser number — one presumably that Trump could reach. If Democrats in Congress objected, as Eastman predicted they would, then under current law the House would be called on to decide the presidency. In that scenario, because the House would vote by individual state congressional delegations, which were mostly Republican majority, the numbers would align for Trump to win. “The illegality of the plan,” declared the Jan. 6 committee in a court filing, “was obvious.” HOW COULD THAT EVEN WORK? To set the plan in motion, Trump and Eastman convened hundreds of electors on a call on Jan. 2, 2021, encouraging them to send alternative electors from their states where Trump’s team was claiming fraud. Arizona, […]

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