Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/474

 expressed an intention to designate an alternate slate of electors." In other words, Eastman acknowledged that the fake votes were invalid, that no State legislature had approved them, and no State legislature would approve them. But President Trump and Eastman still pressed this unlawful scheme on the Vice President. Although Eastman started the January 4th Oval Office meeting maintaining that Vice President Pence had unilateral authority to reject electors, by the end of the meeting he conceded that he would "not recommend that the Vice President assert that he has the authority unilaterally to decide which of the competing slates of electors should be counted."

Jacob ended his memo with a scathing summary. "If the Vice President implemented Professor Eastman's proposal, he would likely lose in court," Jacob wrote. "In a best-case scenario in which the courts refused to get involved, the Vice President would likely find himself in an isolated standoff against both houses of Congress, as well as most or all of the applicable State legislatures, with no neutral arbiter to break the impasse."

Following the Oval Office meeting, during the evening of January 4, 2021, Jacob invited Eastman to send along "any written materials on electoral vote counting issues," including a law review article by Laurence Tribe that Eastman had cited in the Oval Office meeting that day, for Jacob to review on the Vice President's behalf. Jacob reviewed everything that Eastman submitted; nothing changed the analysis he had already done for the Vice President, indeed much of it did not even support Eastman's own arguments.

The Vice President was Not Persuaded by Eastman's Theory and Remained Convinced That His Role at the Joint Session would be Merely Ceremonial. Pence did not relent on January 4th, or at any point during the harrowing two days that followed. "[F]rom my very first conversation with the Vice President on the subject, his immediate instinct was that there is no way that one person could be entrusted by the Framers to exercise that authority," Jacob testified. "And never once did I see him budge from that view, and the legal advice that I provided him merely reinforced it. So, everything that he said or did during [the January 4th meeting in the Oval Office] was consistent with his first instincts on this question."

President Trump did not relent either. His instinct was to increase public pressure on Vice President Pence, despite the Vice President's consistent message to President Trump about the limits of his authority. That evening, during a Senate campaign rally in Dalton, Georgia, President Trump made it