‘An affront to our democracy’: Retired judge who advised Pence will tell Jan 6 panel Trump’s plan was to ‘steal America’s democracy’

The renowned ex-federal appellate judge who advised then-vice president Mike Pence against participating in Donald Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election results plans to tell the House January 6 select committee that Mr Trump’s scheme was a “well-developed plan” and part of an ongoing “war on democracy instigated by the former president and his political party allies”.

Retired Fourth Circuit Judge J Michael Luttig will tell committee members that Mr Trump “instigated” his attack on American democracy “so that he could cling to power that the American People had decided to confer upon his successor, the next president of the United States instead,” according to a copy of his opening statement, which was first published by CNN.

“Knowing full well that he had lost the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his allies and supporters falsely claimed and proclaimed to the nation that he had won the election, and then he and they set about to overturn the election that he and they knew the former president had lost,” Mr Luttig will say. “The treacherous plan was no less ambitious than to steal America’s democracy”.

Mr Luttig’s opening statement describes in graphic detail, the actions of Mr Trump and the mob he had summoned to the Capitol on the day Congress was set to finally certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and make official Mr Trump’s status as a soon-to-be former president.

But the veteran conservative jurist goes on to warn that Mr Trump’s continuing campaign of lies regarding the conduct of the 2020 election and his vow to not suffer defeat should he run in the next presidential election represent an ongoing threat as grave as any the American republic has faced in the nearly 234 years since the US Constitution came into force.

Mr Trump’s “false and reckless insistence” to be the true winner of the 2020 election “has laid waste to Americans’ confidence in their national elections,” Mr Luttig writes.

But he adds that what is “more alarming still” is that the disgraced former president continues to pledge that “his reelection will not be ‘stolen’ from him next time around” and that his GOP allies continue to “obeisantly pledge the same”.

“False claims that our elections have been stolen from us corrupt our democracy, as they corrupt us. To continue to insist and persist in the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is itself an affront to our democracy and to the Constitution of the United States – an affront without precedent,” he writes.

“Those who think that because America is a republic, theft and corruption of our national elections and electoral process are not theft and corruption of our democracy are sorely mistaken. America is both a republic and a representative democracy, and therefore a sustained attack on our national elections is a fortiori an attack on our democracy, any political theory otherwise notwithstanding”.

Mr Luttig’s appearance as a witness before the January 6 select committee comes as the panel plans to use its’ third of a planned six hearings to explore the pressure campaign Mr Trump and his allies against Mr Pence in the run-up to the worst attack on the Capitol since Major General Robert Ross ordered British troops to burn it during the War of 1812.

The then-president had become enamoured of a theory posited by a conservative law professor, John Eastman, who claimed Mr Pence had the power to unilaterally throw out electoral votes from swing states won by Mr Biden.

Mr Luttig entered the fray as an informal adviser to Mr Pence at the request of Mr Pence’s personal attorney just days before the attack.

Because Mr Eastman had clerked for Mr Luttig during his time on the Fourth Circuit, and because Mr Luttig’s constitutional scholarship has long been respected in the conservative movement, it was thought that Mr Pence would be on solid ground if he cited the retired judge’s advice when rejecting Mr Trump’s entreaties.

Mr Luttig writes that there were “many cowards on the battlefield” during the January 6 attack. But in his telling, Mr Pence “was not among them”.

He adds that the theories championed by Mr Eastman were “the product of the most reckless, insidious, and calamitous failures in both legal and political judgment in American history,” and “little more than beguiling and frivolous, perhaps appropriate for academic classroom debate, but singularly inappropriate as counsel to the President of the United States of America in his effort to overturn the presidential election -- an election he had lost fair and square and as to which there was not then, and there is not to this day, evidence of fraud”.

“It is breathtaking that these arguments even were conceived, let alone entertained by the President of the United States at that perilous moment in history,” he writes. “Had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States, America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis”.