WASHINGTON – Days before rioters roamed the halls of the U.S. Capitol threatening to “hang Mike Pence,” Donald Trump told his vice president that people are going to “hate your guts” and “think you're stupid” if he failed to stop the 2020 election certification.
The New Year’s Day warning wasn’t the first time Trump pressured Pence to overturn the election results. Nor was it the last. In what came to be known as “Operation Pence Card,” Trump spent weeks publicly and privately pushing his vice president to help him stay in power after losing.
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“You’re too honest,” Trump berated his vice president in that Jan. 1 morning call.
After they hung up, the president tweeted a reminder for his followers to come to Washington for the “BIG Protest Rally” just days away — what would become the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.
The exchanges between the president and his vice president, detailed in special counsel Jack Smith’s court filing this week, show the extraordinary lengths Trump went to overturn the 2020 election, even as he lays the groundwork to challenge this year's contest, if he loses.
Pence is no longer standing beside Trump, and has refused to endorse the Republican nominee's bid to return to the White House. Trump and his new vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, still refuse to accept the 2020 election results that delivered the presidency to Joe Biden.
At a pivotal moment during this week's debate between Vance and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, Vance declined to say whether he accepted the results of the last election. In a stark retort, Walz said, “That’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”
Much of the special counsel’s filing recounts the tumultuous months after the November election, when Trump — surrounded by allies including Steve Bannon, his former campaign manager turned podcast host, who is now in jail after a contempt of Congress conviction — directed his team to fight to keep him in office. The former president, indicted on criminal charges in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, called the new filing “election interference” and has sought to have the case dismissed.
The day after the election, Trump told Pence to “study up” on the claims of voter fraud in the states they had previously won, when they first ran for office together in 2016.
“It was just look at all of it, let me know what you think,” Pence recalled of their Nov. 4 phone call. “But he told me the campaign was going to fight, was going to go to court and make challenges.”
That weekend, as Biden was projected the winner, Pence tried to “encourage” Trump “as a friend” to consider all that he had accomplished.
“You took a dying party and gave it a new lease on life,” Pence told Trump on Nov. 7.
As the days went on, the campaign team was giving Trump what Pence described as a “sober and somewhat pessimistic report” on the state of the election challenges they were waging.
“Pence gradually and gently tried to convince the defendant to accept the lawful results of the election, even if it meant they lost,” the court filing said.
“Don’t concede but recognize the process is over,” Pence said he told his defeated running mate on Nov. 12.
Four days later at a private lunch, Pence encouraged the president to accept the results and run again in four years. “I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump responded, according to the filing.
By early December there was a shift. Trump was starting to think about Congress’ role in the election process.
“For the first time, he mentioned to Pence the possibility of challenging the election results in the House of Representatives,” the filing said, citing a Dec. 5 phone call.
It was the beginning of an intensifying public and private campaign, orchestrated by Trump, that in the coming weeks would bear down on Pence, and ultimately raise concern for his own safety. Some of the details are described in Pence’s own book, “So Help Me God."
Trump and his team of outside lawyers, headed by Rudy Giuliani, “developed a new plan” after their legal challenges all failed. It was focused on seven states Trump had lost, guided by a proposal from law professor John Eastman to create alternate slates of electors who would claim the defeated president, in fact, had won.
And they turned their attention to Pence.
They falsely claimed that Pence, in his ministerial role as president of the Senate, could decide on Jan. 6 which slates of electors to select, or send them both back to the states for reconsideration, the prosecutors said.
“They lied to Pence, telling him there was substantial campaign fraud and concealing their orchestration of the plan,” the prosecutor wrote. “And they lied to the public, falsely claiming that Pence had the authority during the certification proceeding to reject electoral votes."
Members of Trump’s campaign staff called the plan "crazy” and referred derogatorily to those organizing it as characters from the “Star Wars bar.”
Trump told Pence of his plans for a Jan. 6 rally and expressed the thought it would be a “big day,” the filing said.
As they had lunch together a couple days later, on Dec. 21, Pence again encouraged Trump not to look at the election as a loss but “just an intermission.”
Pence told the president that if they still came up short, “after we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress,” then Trump should “take a bow.”
But Trump would not relent. On Dec. 23, Trump retweeted “Operation Pence Card,” and began to “directly and repeatedly pressure Pence,” prosecutors said, and continued “summoning” his supporters to amass in Washington.
On Christmas Day, when Pence called the president to wish him a Merry Christmas, Trump told him he had the discretion over certification while presiding in Congress.
“You know I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome,” Pence said.
As Jan. 6 approached, the days were becoming more desperate for Trump. The president tore into his vice president during the New Year's morning phone call. The next day he asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” that could prove he won the election in that state. He later told Pence a senator would be seeking a 10-day delay in certification during the proceedings. “You can make the decision,“ Trump told Pence.
Pence took five pages of contemporaneous notes during a meeting at the White House when Trump directed his team to outline the plan for Pence and said, “When there’s fraud the rules change."
Pence told them, "I'm not seeing this argument working.”
"The conspirators were undeterred,” the prosecutor wrote, and Trump continued to publicly pressure Pence.
“I hope Mike Pence comes through for us,” Trump said at a rally in Georgia.
Meeting privately in the Oval Office on Jan. 5, the defeated president told his vice president once more, “I think you have the power to decertify."
When Pence was unmoved, Trump threatened to criticize him publicly: “I'm going to have to say you did a great disservice.”
This concerned Pence, the prosecutor wrote, and the vice president's Secret Service detail was alerted.
Trump called Pence later that evening, with his lawyers, to again raise the issue of sending the electors back to the states. Trump called Pence again late that night: “You gotta be tough tomorrow.”
The next morning, Jan. 6, before Trump took the rally stage, he made one more call to Pence.
When Pence again refused the request, the prosecutor wrote, Trump was incensed.
Trump reinserted remarks targeting Pence into his speech. And Trump sent a crowd of angry supporters to the Capitol.
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Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.