Raskin responds to ‘chilling’ report Pence refused to leave Capitol on Jan. 6

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, on Monday responded to a report that former Vice President Mike Pence refused to leave the Capitol during the attack, referring to Pence’s quoted words during the moment as “chilling.” 

According to an excerpt of the forthcoming book “I Alone Can Fix It” by journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker that was published by The Washington Post, Pence expressed hesitancy to leave the Capitol to his security detail.

“I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Pence told Tim Giebels, his team’s lead special agent, according to the book. 

“I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car,” he added. “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes,” Raskin recounted how former President Trump and other officials tried to coerce Pence into rejecting the certification of the Electoral College vote showing President Biden’s 2020 victory.

“So there were all of these different efforts going on. And then it finally came down to everything focused on Mike Pence. … That was the Hail Mary play or what they were calling the Green Bay Sweep,” Raskin told Hayes. 

“They were going to throw everything in there at Mike Pence, and they were going to try to pressure him and coerce him into rejecting Electoral College votes … in a way that would set the stage for a failure of a majority in the Electoral College and then kicking the whole thing into the House of Representatives under the 12th Amendment for a so-called contingent election.”

Raskin also drew attention to the fact that when the pro-Trump mob stormed the building, it was chanting, among other things, “Hang Mike Pence.”

“So when I heard him, I heard that he said, ‘I’m not getting in our car,’ that was utterly chilling to me. Those are six of the most chilling words in American history to me because they were trying to remove him from the situation,” Raskin told Hayes.  “And of course, there had been this effort to try to get Trump just to invoke martial law under the Insurrection Act.”