Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former prosecutor, brought up a previously undiscussed issue around the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and former President Donald Trump's role in phone calls to delay the vote.
While the insurrectionists were making their way into the building, Trump was on the phone to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) looking for Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). Rudy Giuliani had previously left a message on the wrong phone also looking for Tuberville. The goal was to get him to object to more states than what Republicans had intended while the electoral votes were being counted.
According to Whitehouse, there's an ethics complaint about the role of people like Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), but the evidence today was something different.
"When you look at the evidence today about the president's call to Sen. Tuberville, asking him to delay the proceedings, to add objections, to spread it out, you could see that it's like a Pincer move," Whitehouse said. "On one hand you're getting your mob up to the Capitol, to do this damage and disrupt the counting of the electoral votes, but at the same time you've got to open the window of time during which those electoral votes are counted in order to allow the mob to have its effect, to actually do the damage, to perhaps catch someone. But at a minimum to be able to disrupt."
He continued: "If this thing had gone smoothly and orderly, without objection, we might have been done by the time the mob had breached the Capitol. So, there's a possibility of there having been some connivance between those who tried to create the delay and that being used to open a window long enough that the mob could fight its way in and disrupt the count. So, all of that remains to be seen, but it struck me that when the president called Sen. Tuberville for that specific purpose, that could easily have been a similar call to another colleague."
See the interview below: