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| Photo Credit: AP. |
Mike Pence Attorney Greg Jacob reportedly advised the former US Vice President on January 5 2021 that blocking vote certification would lead to standoff with Congress and possible court loss, Politico quoted a memo released for the first time on Saturday. Former President Donald Trump had urged Mike Pence to block certification of Joe Biden as President elect.
According to the memo, Greg Jacob evaluated a proposal from
Trump legal adviser John Eastman on how Pence could refuse to count electoral
votes from “any state for which an alternate but uncertified slate of electors
has been submitted.”
“If the Vice President implemented Professor Eastman’s proposal,
he would likely lose in court,” Jacob said. “In a best-case scenario in which
the courts refused to get involved, the Vice President would likely find
himself in an isolated standoff against both houses of Congress, as well as
most or all of the applicable State legislatures, with no neutral arbiter
available to break the impasse.”
The former Vice President refused to adopt the Trump advice
and went ahead to certify the result leading to tension with Mr Trump and
rioters at the Capitol who called for him to be hanged.
According to Pence, “President Trump is wrong. I had no
right to overturn the election,” the former vice president said earlier this
year reiterating he had no right to overturn the election. “The presidency
belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. Frankly, there
is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could
choose the American president.”
On Friday the House select committee held its first public
hearing on the deadly attacks on the Capitol on January 6 2021 by a group of
mutinous Trump supporters.
According to Politico, in the memo to Pence, Jacob noted
that Eastman himself acknowledged his proposal would violate the 1887 Electoral
Count Act and laid out multiple provisions of that law Pence would be breaking
if he held up the certification as Eastman urged.
Jacob also faulted Eastman’s advice on grounds that it
contradicted the Electoral Commission of 1877 decision authored by a Supreme
Court justice.
The decision reads “He is not invested with any authority
for making any investigation outside of the joint meeting of the two Houses,” Republican
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley wrote of the vice president.