During a heated phone call before the Jan. 6 attack, Trump called Mike Pence a 'wimp' and the 'p-word'

Witnesses say that during a 'pretty heated' phone call a few days before the attack on the Capitol on January 6, then-President Donald Trump insulted Vice President Mike Pence by calling him a 'wimp' and the 'p-word.' This information was made public on Thursday.

In a clip from a videotaped deposition shown by the House select committee on Jan. 6, former first daughter Ivanka Trump said she was shocked to hear her dad criticize his No. 2.

“The conversation was pretty heated,” she said.

“‘It was a different tone than I heard him take with the vice president before.”

Other segments revealed former Trump assistant Nicholas Luna saying that Trump called Pence a “wimp” and Julie Radford, Ivanka’s former chief of staff, Trump called him “the p-word.”

Photos that had never been seen before showed that Trump's sons Don Jr. and Eric were also looking at him while he talked on the phone in the Oval Office.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is with Don Jr., and Lara Trump, who is with Eric, were also at the president's speech.

Even though his closest aides told him it was against the law, Trump kept pushing his last-minute plan to have Pence reject certification of President Joe Biden's election victory.

Even after a group of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and chanted "Hang Mike Pence," the president never called to make sure Pence was safe.

Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. that “Mike Pence doesn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country” as rioters surged past law enforcement officers and began marching through the Capitol.

In a video of her deposition, Sarah Matthews, who used to work as Trump's press secretary, told the panel's investigators that the post "poured gasoline on the fire."

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), who was in charge of questioning the witnesses on Thursday, said, "In the end, Vice President Pence and his team were led to a safe place where they stayed for the next 4 1/2 hours. They just missed rioters a few feet away."

Greg Jacob, who used to be Pence's lawyer, said that Trump never called the vice president to make sure he was safe.

“Did Donald Trump ever call the vice president to check on his safety?” Aguilar (D-Calif.) asked Jacob.“

“He did not,” Jacob replied.

In the weeks before the 2020 vote was certified, Trump lawyer John Eastman came up with a plan that said Pence, as president of the Senate, had the constitutional right to reject electors from states where there was a dispute.

But Jacob said that the vice president thought that there was "no good reason" to change the result of the election.

“The vice president’s first instinct when he heard this theory was that there was no way that our forefathers — who abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III — would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest in the outcome because they were on the ticket … to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election,” Jacob testified.

In recorded testimony, Eric Herschmann, who used to work at the White House, talked about a conversation he had with Eastman about his plan.

“Are you out of your effing mind,” he said he told Eastman​, a conservative law professor​​​.

“You’re going to turn around and tell 78-plus million people in this country that your theory is this is how you’re going to invalidate their votes?” Herschmann said, warning Eastman: “You’re going to cause riots in the streets.”

Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge, told the committee that if he had been Pence's advisor on the day of the riot, he would have "laid" his body on the road before letting him change the election results.

In earlier testimony, Luttig said that if Pence had followed Trump's order to reject the electoral count, it would have been "equivalent to a revolution" and would have caused the "first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic."

The panel also introduced testimony that showed even Eastman was unconvinced that his plan to overturn the election would pass legal muster.

Jacob said he confronted Eastman about his strategy.

“When I pressed him on the point, I said, ‘John, if the vice president did what you’re asking him to do, we would lose nine to nothing in the Supreme Court.’ And he initially stated, ‘Well, I think maybe we lose only 7 to 2,’” Jacob told the panel.

“And after some further discussions [he] acknowledged, ‘Well, yeah, you’re right, we would lose 9 to nothing.’”

Aguilar showed the committee's investigators clips from Eastman's deposition, in which he used the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.

The committee also revealed that Eastman contacted former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and asked to be added to a list of “potential recipients of a presidential pardon.”

“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” Aguilar read from the email.

Luttig concluded the more than three-hour hearing, saying that Trump and his supporters remain a “clear and present danger to American democracy.”

“That’s not because of what happened on Jan. 6, it is because to this very day, the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge in the presidential election of 2024 the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate are to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way they attempted to overturn the 2020 election,” Luttig said.

“I don’t speak those words lightly,” he continued.

“I would have never spoken those words in my life. That’s what the former president and his allies are telling us.”​

The committee held its third public hearing on Thursday.

In the first hearing, which took place last Thursday during prime time, and the second, which took place Monday morning, campaign and administration officials told Trump that his claims of voter fraud were not true.

On June 21, there will be another hearing.

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