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

Democratic Rep. from Maryland Jamie Raskin, who is serving as a member of the House committee investigating the January 6 riot at the Capitol, responded on Monday to a report that former Vice President Mike Pence refused to leave the building as the attack took place.

Raskin referred to Pence’s quoted words in the heat of the moment as “chilling.” 

As noted in an excerpt of the soon-to-be released book “I Alone Can Fix It” co-authored by journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker that was published by The Washington Post, Pence exuded hesitancy to exit the Capitol to his security personnel.

“I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Pence reportedly told Tim Giebels, the lead special agent of his team. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car,” he went on. “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.” 

While appearing on MSNBC’s program “All In With Chris Hayes,” Raskin recalled how former President Donald Trump and other high-ups in the administration firmly urged Pence to reject the certification of the Electoral College vote that confirmed President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

“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 commented to 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 continued.

He went on to recall his thoughts on what Pence told his security detail: “So when I heard him, I heard that he said, ‘I’m not getting in the 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, and of course, there had been this effort to try to get Trump just to invoke martial law under the Insurrection Act.”