from an opinion piece but very important. One of the many new things we learned last night. Pence assumed control of the armed forces that day.
Although Pence saved American democracy at great personal peril, he did jump the Constitutional rules and assumed power of the armed forces. Because pence figured trump had abdicated his role as commander in chief by not defending the Congress.
And then the Rs tried to cover it up.
We're in a scary place as the command chain gets violated and the President of the USA was in favor of a coup and overthrow of the US government.
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We did not know that Republican lawmakers sought preemptive presidential pardons for their roles in the events leading up to January 6. We did not know that, according to what Cheney billed as direct quotes, Trump reacted to the chants of “hang Mike Pence” by saying, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea” and Pence “deserves it.” We did not know the number of occasions on which White House Counsel Pat Cipollone threatened to resign along with his team, which Jared Kushner described as “whining.” We did not know the regularity with which Trump administration officials were informing the president that he was peddling demonstrably false claims about election fraud, which did not dissuade the president from continuing to do just that.
Most consequentially, we had no confirmation that Donald Trump abdicated his duties as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and that power was usurped out of necessity by the vice president.[/b}
What was Donald Trump doing on January 6 between 2:26 p.m., when Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund made an “urgent immediate request for National Guard assistance,” and 5:40 p.m., when Guardsman finally arrived at the Capitol? The details of Trump’s conduct were vague, but it has long been rumored that Vice President Mike Pence “played a key role in coordinating with the Pentagon” to save from a violent mob both lawmakers and the process of transferring power from one administration to another. According to Rep. Liz Cheney, however, the committee has at least learned what Trump was not doing.
Even as besieged lawmakers on Capitol Hill “begged the president for help,” she revealed, [b]Donald Trump did nothing. “He placed no call to any element of the United States government to instruct that the Capitol be defended,” she continued. “He did not call his Secretary of Defense on January 6. He did not talk to his Attorney General. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day, and he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets.”
Cheney alleged that Mike Pence, surrounded by mayhem and witnessing a vacuum in leadership, simply assumed for himself the constitutional powers vested in the president and took command of the situation. Moreover, according to testimony provided by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, the military was instructed to cover that fact up. Milley testified that Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House chief of staff, “said, ‘We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge and that things are steady or stable’ or words to that effect.”
