Former President called then-Vice President a ‘wimp’ and ‘the P-word’ in a ‘heated’ call on January 6, his daughter Ivanka Trump and White House aides said.
Trump had several family members in the Oval Office with him that morning when he called Pence, it emerged Thursday in the third public hearing by the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riot. Trump was trying to convince Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election with Joe Biden as the winner.
‘When I entered the office the second time, he was on the telephone with who I later found out to be was the vice president,’ Ivanka said in a video testimony played during the hearing. ‘The conversation was pretty heated.’
Ivanka said ‘it was a different tone than I’d heard him take with the vice president before’.
‘I remember the word “wimp”‘, said Nicholas Luna, a former special assistant to Trump, in his testimony. ‘I remember he said, “You are a wimp. You’ll be a wimp”‘.
In another clip, Ivanka’s former chief of staff Julie Radford said the then-first daughter told her that ‘her dad had just had an upsetting conversation with the vice president’.
A questioning attorney asked Radford if she remembered what Trump called Pence.
‘The P-word,’ Radford replied.
Pence’s former attorney Greg Jacob, who was with Pence in his residence when Trump called, gave an extensive live testimony on Thursday. Pence, staffers and Secret Service members were at his residence as he finalized a statement to release that day. They began with a prayer.
Jacob described Pence as ‘steely, determined, grim’, after Trump’s call.
Thursday’s hearing focused on the pressure campaign that Trump and his allies applied to Pence in an attempt to stop him from carrying out his vice presidential role of certifying the election.
Committee member Rep Pete Aguilar said the pro-Trump mob came within 40 feet of Pence and to ‘make no mistake’ that his life was in danger.
The committee unveiled never-before-seen photos of Pence sheltering in a secure underground site as rioters stormed the US Capitol building. One image showed Pence at 4.19pm looking at a tweet by Trump telling the insurrectionists to leave.
About 4 1/2 hours later, Pence returned to the Senate floor to continue the process of certifying the election.
.
