On Thursday new excerpts were revealed from the Carol Leonnig/Philip Rucker book “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” claiming that Mike Pence and his aides were afraid of a rogue Secret Service kidnapping him to stop him from fulfilling his Constitutional duty to certify the 2020 election.
“At 2:26, after a team of agents scouted a safe path to ensure the Pences would not encounter trouble, Giebels and the rest of Pence’s detail guided them down a staircase to a secure subterranean area that rioters couldn’t reach, where the vice president’s armored limousine awaited. Giebels asked Pence to get in one of the vehicles,” the book described.
“We can hold here,” Giebels told Pence.
“I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Pence told him. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”
Nicole Wallace hosted a discussion on the excerpt.
The excerpt also revealed Oval Office activity before his rally on the Ellipse that day.
The president went in and out of the dining room to check on TV coverage, hoping to gauge the size of the crowd on the Ellipse. Stephen Miller was there going over the remarks he and his team had prepared for the president to deliver at the rally. Senior White House officials Mark Meadows, Keith Kellogg and Eric Herschmann were there, too, as were the president’s adult children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump Jr.’s girlfriend. Some of those around the president encouraged his fantasy of Pence the hero stepping in to overturn the election. Guilfoyle, referring to the growing crowd on the Ellipse, told him, “They’re just reflecting the will of the people. This is the will of the people.”
Ivanka Trump did not agree and was upset about what attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and others had been advising her father. At one point that morning, she said: “This is not right. It’s not right.”
“Mike Pence is a good man,” Ivanka told Pence’s national security adviser.
The Washington Post reported the excerpt.
Additional source at The Hill.
