Roughly a week before then-Vice President Mike Pence certified Joe Biden's 2020 victory, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sent him a detailed plan written by one of Donald Trump's lawyers for how he could overturn the election results, journalist Jonathan Karl reports in his new book.
In an excerpt from the ABC correspondent's forthcoming book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, he details how on New Years Eve last year, the president's chief of staff tried to pressure Pence into unprecedented political waters.
Meadows allegedly emailed Pence's top aide a memo written by Jenna Ellis, who along with Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell was waging an all-out legal war against a handful of states that narrowly went to Biden that November.
The memo proposed that on January 6, Pence would object to the certification of ballots from six states where Trump baselessly alleged there was fraud, according to the excerpt released by ABC News.
Ellis reportedly wrote that Pence would then give those six states until January 15 at 7 p.m. Eastern Time to send back a different set of votes.
'No electoral votes can be opened and counted from that state' if they didn't comply or missed the deadline.
The lawyer's argument was that it would then leave neither Trump nor Biden with a majority of votes, forcing the decision of who takes the White House onto each state's Congressional delegations.
Trump would then be reinstated if Republicans' 26-state majority voted along party lines, Ellis reasoned according to Karl.
Mark Meadows reportedly sent Mike Pence's top aide a memo that effectively outlined instructions for overturning the 2020 election, a new book excerpt claims
But that wasn't the end of the previously-unknown pressure campaign on Pence just days before violent Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol looking for him.
The next day on January 1, John McEntee - who served as Trump's Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office - followed
