Trump called Mike Pence a ‘wimp’ during intense call before Jan. 6 attack

Then-President Donald Trump angrily insulted Vice President Mike Pence during a “pretty heated” phone call shortly before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — calling him a “wimp” and the “p-word,” according to witness accounts made public Thursday.

In a clip from a videotaped deposition shown by the House select committee on Jan. 6, former first daughter Ivanka Trump said she was taken aback while listening to her dad berate his No. 2.

“The conversation was pretty heated,” she said.

“‘It was a different tone than I heard him take with the vice president before.”

Other segments revealed former Trump assistant Nicholas Luna saying that Trump called Pence a “wimp” and Julie Radford, Ivanka’s former chief of staff, Trump called him “the p-word.”

Never-before-seen photos showed that Trump children Don Jr. and Eric were also watching as he spoke on the phone in the Oval Office.

Don Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Eric’s wife, Lara Trump, were also present for the presidential harangue.

Trump continued pressing his 11th-hour scheme to have Pence reject certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory even as his closest aides told him it was illegal, testimony revealed.

And even after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” the president never called to check on his safety.

Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. that “Mike Pence doesn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country” as rioters surged past law enforcement officers and began marching through the Capitol.

Sarah Matthews, a former press aide to Trump, described the posting as “pouring gasoline on the fire” to the panel’s investigators in a video of her deposition.

“Vice President Pence and his team ultimately were led to a secure location where they stayed for the next 4 1/2 hours, barely missing rioters a few feet away,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), a member of the panel who took the lead in questioning the witnesses on Thursday.

Greg Jacob, a former counsel to Pence, testified that Trump never called the vice president to ensure his safety.

“Did Donald Trump ever call the vice president to check on his safety?” Aguilar (D-Calif.) asked Jacob.“

“He did not,” Jacob replied.

In the weeks leading up to the certification of the 2020 vote, Trump lawyer John Eastman concocted a proposal that asserted that Pence had the constitutional authority to reject electors from disputed states as the president of the Senate.

But Jacob said the vice president believed “there is no justifiable basis” to alter the outcome of the election.

“The vice president’s first instinct when he heard this theory was that there was no way that our forefathers — who abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III — would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest in the outcome because they were on the ticket … to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election,” Jacob testified.

Eric Herschmann, a former White House counsel, was shown in recorded testimony recounting a conversation he had with Eastman about his plan.

“Are you out of your effing mind,” he said he told Eastman​, a conservative law professor​​​.

“You’re going to turn around and tell 78-plus million people in this country that your theory is this is how you’re going to invalidate their votes?” Herschmann said, warning Eastman: “You’re going to cause riots in the streets.”

Retired federal judge Michael Luttig told the committee that if he had been advising Pence on the day of the riot, he would have “laid” his body on the road before letting him overturn the election.

In earlier testimony, Luttig said it would have been “tantamount to a revolution” if Pence had obeyed Trump’s order to reject the electoral count and would have created the “first constitutional crisis since the founding of the republic.”

The panel also introduced testimony that showed even Eastman was unconvinced that his plan to overturn the election would pass legal muster.

Jacob said he confronted Eastman about his strategy.

“When I pressed him on the point, I said, ‘John, if the vice president did what you’re asking him to do, we would lose nine to nothing in the Supreme Court.’ And he initially stated, ‘Well, I think maybe we lose only 7 to 2,’” Jacob told the panel.

“And after some further discussions [he] acknowledged, ‘Well, yeah, you’re right, we would lose 9 to nothing.’”

Aguilar showed clips of Eastman’s deposition before the committee’s investigators in which he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.

The committee also revealed that Eastman contacted former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and asked to be added to a list of “potential recipients of a presidential pardon.”

“I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” Aguilar read from the email.

Luttig concluded the more than three-hour hearing, saying that Trump and his supporters remain a “clear and present danger to American democracy.”

“That’s not because of what happened on Jan. 6, it is because to this very day, the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge in the presidential election of 2024 the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate are to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way they attempted to overturn the 2020 election,” Luttig said.

“I don’t speak those words lightly,” he continued.

“I would have never spoken those words in my life. That’s what the former president and his allies are telling us.”​

Thursday’s hearing was the third the committee has held publicly.

The previous hearings — in primetime last Thursday and the second Monday morning — laid out how campaign and administration officials pleaded with Trump that his claims of voter fraud were unfounded.​The next hearing is scheduled for June 21.

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