expected witness, judge michael luttig, will be another live witness on thursday. judge luttig, renowned conservative judge, advised mike pence and his team in the days before january 6th not to take john eastman s advice and follow the eastman plan. this is where we begin the hour today. jonathan carl is here, the chief washington correspondent for abc news and the author of betrayal: the final act of the trump show. mike schmidt is here, new york times washington correspondent, and with us at the table, joyce vance, former u.s. attorney, now law professor at the university of alabama. mike and joyce are both msnbc contributors. john carl, we start with you. i flipped through betrayal again. you write about a lot of what the focus will be on thursday. just remind us sort of, it is perhaps the most dramatic standoff between trump and eastman on one side and pence and those who advised him and worked for him on the other. it was incredible intense and
closest scrape we have so far, and clark, who has to date said in his public statements, oh, i was just giving options. clearly has been lying to the public. he twice, not once, but twice this dramatic meeting is the second, went around the back of the attorney general. i can t tell you what a cardinal offense that is for someone who s like eighth or tenth on the flowchart to meet with trump and do this plot, stunning and almost worked. and nick, i want to read more from the washington post reporting. it also shows how trump assembled the coup team, almost adjacent to folks that really weren t celebrated as particularly effective at pulling the levers of the government to serve the people, but clark was his man at doj. look, i think what we see here is the way that trump ran this is not that he was pulling every string charting the course, and he never was as president. all right? it wasn t his thing. keep me in office. i don t want to leave. i think i won, and then he
all of the adults in the room and this has been part of what s been so effective about their presentation said this is a lie. you can t do this. these were just people whose only sort of qualification is they got themselves to him saying i can make something up for you. i can say that the emperor is wearing clothes, but these new revelations by clark we missed this by an eyelash. we had no idea, it wasn t just donohue who stood up, donohue and dozens of doj officials were ready resign if trump did this and that and that alone made him back down. but imagine if this letter had gone out under the e just of the new acting attorney general instead of the m.o. i ve heard, he would have had the department of justice to say there s something fishy here, mr. raffensperger, you better go figure this out, et cetera. everything could have changed on a dime. we re looking at, i think, the
watched as people came out of the wood work from the lower rungs of his bureaucracy from outside the white house, sidney powell, and offered him the means, and he sat there in a meeting with the head of his own doj and debated with that person and their deputy for three hours if he would fire them in front of them and what it s like his tv show, what was it called? like what was it? the apprentice. and what held him back in the end, according to this report was not that he thought it was wrong or it would be wrong or the reports of fraud were wrong, it wouldn t be effective. it wouldn t work. everyone stick around, there are more stunning details in this meeting nick s talking about, that we re all talking about on this january 3rd oval office meeting between trump and his top team, which became like lord of the flies at that point. it s a moment that could be pivotal to the whole trump coup attempt as well as the january 6th hearings. we ll have more from that report, plus 3
election result. it s a pressure campaign that came incredibly and alarmingly close to actually working. it could have completely changed the game for trump and his allies on january 6th if and only if it had succeeded. washington post is out with stunning new details on efforts by doj official jeffrey clark to essentially take over the justice department, efforts which culminated in a january 3rd meeting previously reported on by the post, the new york times and other outlets inside the oval office between clark, the man who would become the acting a.g. and his deputy richard donahue and of course one donald j. trump from the post reporting. clark had outlined a plan. in a letter he wanted to send to the leaders of key states that joe biden won. it said the justice department had, quote, identified significant concerns about the vote and that the state should consider sending a separate slate of electors supporting donald j. trump for congress to