To block Donald Trump’s coup attempt in January 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, his lawyer Richard Cullen, and retired Federal judge Michael Luttig collaborated on a Twitter thread exposing and knocking back the Trumpian plot.

The intervention began on the night of January 4, two days before Pence would chair the Congressional session certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

Cullen called his old friend Luttig, “Tell me about John Eastman.”

Eastman, a former law clerk for Luttig, was the author of a memorandum setting out how Pence would disqualify Biden’s electors and send the decision to the US House of Representatives, where Republicans would keep Trump in the White House.

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The judge “understood that this was a signal moment in history”. He told Cullen that Eastman’s plan had no legal basis: “You know, there’s no question that the Vice President has no choice [to intervene in the Congressional certification] as a Constitutional matter.”

“I Don’t Know How to Tweet”

The next morning, Cullen urgently called back: Trump was going to ask Pence, as chair of the Congressional session, to implement the plan.

Luttig recalled, “The gist of it was, ‘Is there anything you can do to help and support the Vice President?'”

The two men struggled with how to respond effectively. After a series of further calls, Luttig noted that he had set up a Twitter account weeks earlier. His problem was “I don’t know how to tweet. And I don’t know how to tweet a thread, I think is what you call it.”

Cullen told the judge that a tweet would be ideal. Luttig asked the lawyer to ensure Pence approved. Five minutes, Cullen called with the assurance.

Luttig recounted:

Okay, Richard, I don’t like this, doing something that is at a national level, on behalf of the Vice President of the United States, when he doesn’t even know what I’m going to say.

And Richard says, “I understand, but we need to do this. Let’s get it done.”

“The Support That Pence Wanted and Needed”

Luttig carefully followed Twitter’s instruction on how to compose a thread. He typed out a statement in a Word document, counted the number of characters, and then cut-and-pasted the text into seven tweets.

“I’m a perfectionist. So I went over that, maybe five or 10 times on Twitter, before I pushed the button,” the judge recalled. At 9:53 a.m. Eastern US time on January 5, he posted the thread.

The next day, just before chairing the Congressional session, Pence wrote a letter in which he quoted the thread, “The Constitution does not empower the Vice President to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain votes or otherwise.”

On January 7, Pence called Luttig to thank him for the tweets.

It was the first time the two men had even spoken. Luttig explained:

He knew what he was doing. I was the one person in America who could come over the top of everybody concerned and give the Vice President the support that he wanted and needed.

“A Historic Inflection Point”

Luttig is still involved in trying to deal with the aftermath of the Trump coup attempt, and the prospect that it could happen again. On the first anniversary of the Capitol Attack, which tried to interrupt the Congressional certification, he e-mailed the New York Times:

I was gravely worried for our country last January 6. A year later, I am even more worried, fearful of the peril that lies ahead for America. We are at an historic inflection point as to who we are and who we are going to be as a nation. History is watching and anxiously awaiting our decision.

He followed up last week with a guest opinion essay in the Times:

Mr. Trump and his allies insist that the 2020 election was “stolen”, a product of fraudulent voting and certifications of electors who were not properly selected. Over a year after the election, they continue to cling to these disproved allegations, claiming that these “irregularities” were all the evidence Mr. Pence needed to overturn the results, and demanding that the rest of the GOP embrace their lies.

The balance of the Republican Party, mystifyingly stymied by Mr. Trump, rejects these lies, but, as if they have fallen through the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland, they are confused as to exactly how to move on from the 2020 election when their putative leader remains bewilderingly intent on driving the wedge between the believers in his lies and the disbelievers.