Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, who briefed Pence on his role in certifying the 2020 election, stated that if Pence had followed Trump’s orders to invalidate the election, it would have sparked a “constitutional crisis.”

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“I believe that had Vice President Pence obeyed the orders from his president and the president of the United States of America during the joint sessions of the Congress of the United States on Jan. 6, 2021 — and declared Donald Trump the next president of the United States, notwithstanding that then President Trump had lost the Electoral College vote as well as the popular vote in the 2020 presidential election — that declaration of Donald Trump as the next president would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America,” Luttig elaborated during questioning from Liz Cheney.

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“Which, in my view, and I’m only one man, would have been the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic,” Luttig added.

Cheney contributed to the plan devised by Trump and his associates to have Pence pause the electoral vote count.

She claimed that on December 13, 2020, the day before the Electoral College met, attorney Kenneth Chesebro issued a note to Rudy Giuliani asserting that the vice president is tasked with “making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.”

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A group of Trump voters in Arizona, as well as other swing states, declared themselves the state’s lawful electors, resulting in two sets of electors: the actual group chosen by the states and the fake electors. Cheney also stated that future sessions would dive more into the issue of fake voters.

When the Joint Session of Congress reached Arizona in the alphabetical list of states on Jan. 6, Chesebro wrote that Pence should not tally the state’s electoral votes for Biden “because there are two slates of votes.”

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Cheney highlighted a federal judge’s judgement that “that ‘the draft memo pushed a strategy that knowingly violated the Electoral Count Act'” and that the “memo is both intimately related to and clearly advanced the plan to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”