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Fact check: Pedesta plan in event that Trump did not leave office in 2020
Executive Summary
A cluster of contemporaneous reporting and memos documented efforts by lawyers and advisers associated with President Trump to devise legal and political mechanisms for overturning or delaying the 2020 election certification, most prominently John Eastman’s six-step memo urging Vice President Mike Pence to reject or return electoral votes — a plan Pence refused to follow [1] [2]. Other memos from campaign lawyers, and reporting on pressure campaigns inside the administration, show competing legal theories and efforts to enlist officials, but the available sources also document rejection of those theories by key actors and legal advisers [3] [4].
1. Bombshell Memo and a Concrete Six-Step Scheme That Pence Rejected
A disclosed memo authored by John Eastman laid out a six-step plan for Vice President Pence to interrupt certification of the Electoral College count and either return contested slates or create a path for Congress to choose an alternate winner; reporting says Pence and his counsel ultimately rejected these instructions as constitutionally unsupported [1] [2]. The reporting characterizes Eastman’s plan as an attempt to use the vice president’s ceremonial role to effect a substantive change in electoral outcomes, and contemporaneous coverage documents that Pence’s advisers viewed the approach as legally flawed and unworkable in practice [1].
2. Parallel Memos and Multiple Lawyering Theories Complicated the Picture
Beyond Eastman, other memos circulated inside the campaign and to sympathetic lawmakers proposing mechanisms to send electoral slates back to state legislatures or to trigger contested votes in Congress; a Jenna Ellis memo described one such approach involving six battleground states that could have produced a congressional deadlock favorable to Trump [3]. These documents reveal overlapping but distinct legal strategies, suggesting the campaign entertained multiple avenues simultaneously — a sign of coordinated persistence but also of internal disagreement about legality and risk, with some recipients like Senators rejecting the arguments as meritless [2].
3. Congressional and Institutional Pushback Was Decisive and Public
Multiple sources record that key Republican lawmakers and institutional actors declined to adopt the theories advanced in the memos, publicly and privately rejecting the legal grounding and refusing to block certification; Pence’s refusal to act unilaterally was a turning point cited across contemporaneous reporting [2] [4]. The narrative established in these sources shows institutional resistance — from congressional leaders to the vice president’s office — that constrained the practical effect of the memos despite their circulation and the intense pressure campaign accompanying them [5].
4. Wider Efforts to Influence Officials and the Transition Landscape
Separate reporting and analyses document a broader pattern of attempts to influence law enforcement and executive-branch officials during the period, including demands to drop investigations and personnel changes, which contextualize the memos as part of a larger set of pressure tactics inside the administration [6]. That reporting portrays the legal memos as one component in a constellation of strategies aimed at preserving power, highlighting coordination between political, legal, and administrative levers even when specific legal arguments failed to gain institutional traction [6].
5. Contrasting Portrayals and What Was Omitted in Public Accounts
The assembled sources present contrasting emphases: some accounts foreground the memos’ novel legal theories and the danger of their implementation, while others emphasize decisive rejections and the ceremonial limits of the vice presidency [1] [4]. Notably, public reporting at the time focused on memos and pressure but left less granular public record about private deliberations inside certain offices and about any contingency planning beyond legal memos, creating room for later narratives that either amplify threats or underscore institutional resilience [3] [7].
6. Why the Debate Mattered: Constitutional Limits, Precedent, and Political Stakes
The source material frames the controversy around constitutional interpretation of the vice president’s role and the precedent that would be set by allowing electoral certification to be treated as a discretionary act; this legal core explains why the memos triggered wide pushback and why lawmakers and Pence’s team publicly rejected their implementation [1] [5]. The memos’ circulation and the parallel pressure campaigns illustrate how unsettled procedural questions can become high-stakes political tools, even when mainstream legal counsel and institutional actors resist rewriting those rules [2].
7. Bottom Line: Documented Plans Met Practical Rejection, Leaving Open Wider Lessons
The documentary record in these sources shows that explicit plans existed to use the vice presidency and other levers to alter the election outcome, but those plans failed to secure the cooperation of key institutional actors and were publicly repudiated by some recipients; the episode underscores tensions between aggressive legal strategies and constitutional constraints [1] [2] [4]. The sources collectively illuminate both the mechanics of the proposed schemes and the countervailing institutional forces that prevented their realization, while leaving unresolved questions about informal pressure and contingency planning beyond the memos themselves [6] [3].