Following the Capitol riots on January 6, a documentary crew purportedly caught the moment Mike Pence discovered that Congress intended to use the 25th Amendment to remove former President Trump from office and replace him with the vice president.
The video was recorded on January 12, 2021, and showed Pence reading an email on his phone before awkwardly clearing his throat and saying, “Yeah, good,” before returning to political cliches.
The awkward moment, according to documentary maker Alex Holder, occurred when Pence read an email calling for Trump to be removed. Holder claims the time stamp on his tape corresponds to the time the email was written. Pence rejects that.
The leaked interview’s video was shot less than a week after pro-Trump protesters overran the Capitol, and it was taken from a Holder documentary that was recently subpoenaed by a congressional committee looking into the attack.
The interview took place on January 12, 2021, the day the House of Representatives passed a resolution requesting that Pence succeed Trump through an amendment.
According to the 25th Amendment, Pence, 63, and the majority of the Cabinet have the authority to declare the president to be unfit for duty, which would have put him in charge of the nation.
The resolution was approved by Congress, but Pence rejected it, claiming that using the statute would “create a terrible precedent.”
Video from the interview that CNN has received showed Pence learning about Congress’ plans for the first time as he is given a phone and an email containing a draft of the resolution by a staff member.
After reading the document and seeming noticeably uncomfortable, Pence replies, “Yeah, terrific.”
Then, the vice president chuckles and tells his assistant to “get Zach to print me off a physical copy for the ride home,” flashing what appears to be a fake grin.
The former governor of Indiana continues the conversation by declaring, “I am always hopeful about America,” against a background of construction workers building a security fence around the Capitol.
The documentary’s creators claim Pence was handed a draft of the House resolution in the scene, which details Trump’s disastrous 2020 reelection campaign.
A Pence official clarified on Friday that the congressman was actually responding to confirmation that his letter rejecting the potential coup had been received.
According to the Pence spokesman, “In the documentary, Vice President Pence was responding to confirmation that his letter to Speaker Pelosi rejecting her attempt to use the 25th Amendment had been delivered.
According to a timestamp on the email, the White House sent Pence’s letter to Pelosi at exactly 7:48 PM, which is the time Pence mentions in the video.
At the time, information about the letter was widely disseminated in the days that followed.
“Last week, I did not bow to pressure to exert force beyond my constitutional authority to affect the outcome of the election,” Pence stated in his letter.
At this critical juncture in the life of our country, “I will not now submit to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games.”
After President John F. Kennedy was killed, the states ratified the amendment so that Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice president at the time, could succeed him.
The day after the video was captured, the House decided to convict Trump of inciting the Capitol uprising.
After a widely publicized trial, the Senate would shortly declare Trump innocent of inciting the uprising.
The then-president was found guilty by a majority of senators, but not by the needed two-thirds majority.
With interviews with Trump, Pence, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and others, Holder’s three-part documentary series, titled “Unprecedented,” offers a distinctive viewpoint on the inner workings of the White House at this time.
Holder complied with the panel’s subpoena for his raw video of anything associated with the Capitol attack as well as his interviews with Trump, his adult children, and Pence on Thursday, and then showed up for a private deposition before the January 6 select committee.
CBS reported that there are at least 11 hours of direct-to-camera interviews with Trump and his family among the dozens of hours of material the filmmaker shot while following the president and his entourage.
There is video of the incident that occurred on January 6, 2021, as Holder and his team were on the grounds of the Capitol.
An photograph of a name place card for Holder on Air Force One, which every guest receives when they fly on the president’s plane, was obtained and released Thursday by Politico Playbook, further demonstrating the scope of access.
According to a Tuesday piece, the film shocked the Trump universe, with one former top 2020 official for Trump texting Rolling Stone and asking, “What the f*** is this?”
Many of the senior Trump campaign and administration advisers told the publication that they had no idea a documentary was being made or that a crew had been following the president throughout his final months in office.
The January 6 panel decided to hold additional hearings in July to examine the fresh information after learning about the footage.
After beginning a series of at least eight hearings earlier this month, the panel will convene its fifth session on Thursday afternoon. But with the hours of video material and testimony from Holder, the number of public and broadcast sessions will now rise.
This summer, a major streaming service will release Holder’s three-part series on Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and the final days of his presidency.
The select committee demanded interviews with the former president, the former vice president, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. as well as whatever raw video Holder’s team had of the attack that day.
Holder said in a statement on Tuesday that he completely complied with the subpoena and sent over the video; he also said that he would be meeting with the panel on Thursday for an interview.
Several members of the former president’s campaign leadership, including two officials who were still employed by the administration after the January 6 attack, were said to have learned about the documentary project for the first time as a result of Tuesday’s revelations of the subpoena, according to a former senior Trump official.
Another former official, who claimed to be uninformed of the documentary and who claimed to be startled to discover of its existence, told Rolling Stone that the entire project is a “bad concept.”
Despite the lack of knowledge about the documentary, the panel looking into the prior administration’s involvement in the Capitol riot is now utilizing it as evidence, and the three-part project is scheduled to be made available this summer on a streaming service.
At least three former Justice Department employees, including Richard Donoghue, Steve Engel, and Jeff Rosen, will testify at the committee’s fifth session on Thursday in the afternoon.
During the time period beginning on January 6, 2021, Donoghue served as the former president’s acting deputy attorney general, Engel worked as a lawyer for the Trump DOJ, and Rosen served as the latter’s acting attorney general.
The committee looking into the attack on January 6 wants to know what Holder recorded since he was given extensive access to Trump and his closest associates, including his family and the vice president.
Politico was the first to disclose on Tuesday that the panel summoned Holder on June 15.
The first of the three items requested by the subpoena was any video Holder and his associates may have taken on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.
Second, the panel instructed him to give over any raw video of the interviews he held with Trump, his children Eric and Don Jr., daughter Ivanka, senior adviser Jared Kushner, and his deputy Mike Pence.
Along with that, the committee requested that Holder provide “any raw footage relevant to talks of electoral fraud or election integrity surrounding the November 2020 presidential election.”