Pence-world’s final takedown of Trump’s Jan. 6 bid to remain in power revealed

Such a move, Jacob concluded, would assuredly fail in court. Or worse, he said, the courts would refuse to get involved and leave America in an unprecedented political crisis.

In that case, he said in the memo obtained by POLITICO and published for the first time, “the Vice President would likely find himself in an isolated standoff against both houses of Congress … with no neutral arbiter available to break the impasse.”

Jacob is scheduled to testify publicly Thursday to the Jan. 6 select committee about Pence’s decision to resist Trump’s pressure campaign. The panel declined to comment on Jacob’s memo.

The memo informed Pence’s ultimate decision to rebuff pressure from Trump to reverse the outcome of the election. Pence announced his decision the next day, when he traveled to the Capitol to preside over the Jan. 6 meeting of the House and Senate. His decision, in a letter that closely tracked Jacob’s memo, inflamed a crowd of thousands of Trump supporters that the president had called to Washington to protest his defeat.

Within an hour of Pence’s announcement, hundreds of members of that mob would bludgeon their way past police lines and into the Capitol itself, sending the vice president and members of Congress fleeing for safety. Some members of that mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”

The Jan. 6 select committee has had Jacob’s memo for months. It’s an important element of the panel’s view that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the election, when his legal challenges had all failed. Pence’s team firmly believed that embracing Trump’s push to block Joe Biden’s presidency would require numerous violations of the Electoral Count Act, a position they had relayed to both Trump and attorney John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who developed Trump’s fringe legal strategy to remain in power.

Jacob’s memo, titled “Analysis of Professor Eastman’s Proposals,” is dated Jan. 5. But Jacob told the select committee in February he drafted most of it a day earlier in response to an intense first-time meeting with Eastman.

A federal judge has agreed that Eastman’s strategy likely veered into criminal territory. U.S. District Court Judge David Carter ruled in March that Eastman’s legal theories were outcome-driven and unsupported — he dubbed it “a coup in search of a legal theory” — and that effort to obstruct the counting of electoral votes likely amounted to a criminal conspiracy with Trump.

In his memo, Jacob said Eastman acknowledged his proposal would require Pence to violate the Electoral Count Act in four ways. They included rejecting the law’s requirements that 1) Pence count all electoral votes from states in alphabetical order, resolving any disputes before moving on to the next state; 2) Pence call for any objections from lawmakers after introducing each state’s slate of electors; 3) lawmakers be permitted to consider competing slates of electors; and 4) the session of Congress cannot be adjourned once it starts and must conclude within five days.

“Eastman’s proposal, by contrast, contemplate[s] an extended recess of the joint session to allow State legislatures to investigate…