This confuses me. Pence – and his national security advisor – thought the Secret Service was going to have him disappeared?
Or is it that the security advisor was protecting Trump’s need for Pence to overthrow the proceedings, and thought the Secret Service would interfere with that plan by taking Pence away? Because that would suggest that he didn’t yet realize that Pence wasn’t going to implement the Trump plan.
Or maybe he would have, if the insurrection hadn’t gotten in the way.
Edited to add, from the article:
Wallace then painted an even more dire picture.
“Pence feared a conspiracy, feared that the Secret Service would aid Trump and his ultimate aims that day,” said Wallace. “This is the most harrowing version of Mike Pence’s day I’ve seen reported.”
Jane Mayer’s latest investigation for ‘The New Yorker’ is about rich and powerful conservative groups that are exploiting Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud in order to promote alterations in the way that ballots are cast and counted. “The 2020 election is long since over in most people’s minds, and settled and decided,” Mayer says. “But these groups are doubling down in the money they’re putting into and the effort they’re putting into trying to push the idea of fraud — potentially in order to challenge the 2022 midterms, and the 2024 election.”
35 minute audio:
I went out to Arizona to take a look at this audit, and what I discovered was it’s not taking place in a vacuum. And it’s actually not just an Arizona thing. It’s being funded by out-of-state interests, deep-pocketed people who are allies of Donald Trump — that’s specifically the audit — and it’s taking place against a backdrop of this spreading belief that voter fraud is rife in America and that elections can’t be trusted. And that is being spread by national groups, some of them quite well-known and established in Republican circles. And so I kept sort of peeling back the onion to try to figure out, where is this coming from? And the picture began to clarify that actually there’s a money stream and an awful lot of it is coming from one single huge foundation in Milwaukee, Wis., which is funding all of these other groups that are pushing the idea that voter fraud is a serious problem in America and that we can’t trust our elections. And that one huge foundation is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The Bradley family — these two brothers that founded this company, the Allen-Bradley Company — they defined the far-right fringe. They were dedicated anti-communist zealots who feared that the United States government was run by communists. And they were fringe figures politically, but they were extraordinarily rich by the time they died. And their fortune has funded this far-right foundation.
On Cleta Mitchell, who is on the board of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
People may not know Cleta Mitchell’s name, or they may not have known it until news stories broke right at the beginning of this year that there was a lawyer on the call with Trump — it was a conference call to Georgia election officials. And Trump was basically berating them, saying, I just need to have 11,780 more votes because that will make me win in Georgia. Just find the votes. And it sounded as if they were just trying to overturn the election in Georgia.
And on that call was a lawyer named Cleta Mitchell. And it turns out Cleta Mitchell is fundamental to this movement to argue that voter fraud is rampant in America and that Georgia’s election was a fraud and that Trump really won it. And she’s been deeply involved in these issues, at least as far back as 2012. And she is on the board of the Bradley Foundation, where they have $850 million in their treasury to spend on all kinds of issues, including this.
The right wing nutjobs rallied at the ellipse at 9 AM. Trump starts agitating the crowd at 12 noon. At 12:20, the crowd moves towards the capital.
Congress didn’t meet in joint session until 1:05 PM
The Capitol was breached at 2:11 PM The Nicole Wallace story says that Pence balked at 2:26 PM
The capitol was finally cleared at 7:30 PM; the senate reconvened at 8:06 PM and the House at 9 PM. They counted through the night, and “debated” the objections and the count wasn’t complete until 3:24 AM the next morning
see, i have a different take on this. whether or not actual harm was perpetrated against pence, it makes total sense to target him.
it’s not ( i think? ) too conspiratorial for someone in bunker boy’s circle to game it out: if pence is in danger, the secret service are supposed to cart him to safety.
if mike pence is removed for safety, he can’t certify the election. if he doesn’t certify the election, doubt and confusion prevails: an ideal situation for fascists. then everything gets passed to the newly trump friendly supreme court.
presumably they didn’t even have to get their supporters to breach the capitol. for them - kind of like the collapse of the trade center towers was for the 9/11 terrorists - it was maybe even not expected.
“hang pence” - sure, im sure they were happy to and would have. but they didn’t have to believe that part would work. all they had to do was get him to run away, and/or for his security to wisk him away.
whether pence knew in advance what might happen would be an interesting question, at least in the moment he realized though: he had to stay there.
i think the article is probably wrong to imply he felt he was being “kidnapped”. more likely he simply felt it was his duty to stay, and knew he wouldn’t be able to get back if he left.
A federal judge on Monday questioned why U.S. prosecutors are asking Capitol riot defendants to pay only $1.5 million in restitution while American taxpayers are paying more than $500 million to cover the costs of the Jan. 6 attack by a pro-Trump mob…
Howell has already asked in another defendant’s plea hearing whether no-prison misdemeanor plea deals offered by the government are too lenient for individuals involved in “terrorizing members of Congress,” asking pointedly whether the government had “any concern about deterrence?”…
The department and U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment beyond court statements.
