Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville kept his story by informing then President Trump that then Vice President Mike Pence was being escorted out of the Capitol while protesters stormed the building on January 6, after one of the impeachment lawyers for Trump on Friday characterized the call as “hearsay”.
The telephone conversation between Tuberville and Trump became an important part of the timeline of the former president’s behavior during the riot as senators continued to conduct Trump’s impeachment trial on Friday.
House managers claimed that the Tuberville-Trump call started around 2:00 pm on January 6 and that Trump tweeted 24 minutes after Pence lacked the “courage” to delay certification for the 2020 election. Pence was evacuated around 2:15 pm, and Tuberville said he passed the fact on to the president.
House managers, acting as prosecutors at Trump’s Senate trial, said the ex-president’s call to Tuberville and the subsequent tweet showed that he did not try to stop the violent crowd, despite knowing how dire the situation was for his vice president.
But Michael van der Veen, one of Trump’s lawyers, rejected the call, which Tuberville confirmed to the Politician on Wednesday night, as a “rumor”, despite one of the participants in the call attesting that it had occurred.
“I challenge the premise of your facts, I challenge the facts that are exposed in that question and, unfortunately, we will not know the answer to these facts in this process because the Chamber did nothing to investigate what happened” on January 6, van der Veen said in response to a question from Senator Bill Cassidy, R-La., About whether Trump was “tolerant of intimidation” against Pence. “We are trying to hear rumors from Mr. Tuberville.”
Tuberville told CNN’s Manu Raju that he kept his version of events, although he said he was not sure when exactly the call took place.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jamie Gaskin, D-Md., One of the managers of the house, said van der Veen should have made Trump testify at the trial instead of blaming the Democrats for not having all the facts.
“Instead of yelling at us and shouting about how we didn’t have time to get all the facts about what your client did,” said Raskin, “bring your client here and testify under oath about why he was sending tweets denouncing the vice president of the United States while the vice president was being chased by a mob who wanted to hang him and shouted in this building, ‘hang mike pence! hang mike pence! traitor! traitor! traitor!”