In an impeachment trial video of the Capitol riots, former Vice President Mike Pence can be seen being rushed to safety as a military aide follows with what multiple experts identified as a “nuclear football.”
The video, which was presented on Wednesday by House impeachment manager Del. Stacey Plaskett on the second day of the Senate impeachment trial, shows Pence, Secret Service, a military aide and other officials being quickly evacuated as the mob forced its way into the Capitol nearby.
The rioters, some of whom were heard shouting ‘Hang Mike Pence!” after a tweet from the president, came within 100 feet of Pence’s position at one point, The Washington Post reported.
That puts the violent mob alarmingly close to the “football” following Pence.
The “nuclear football,” officially known as the president’s emergency satchel, is a mobile nuclear command and control asset that a president can use in combination with other tools to wage nuclear war should such extreme action be deemed necessary.
The president as the commander in chief of the armed forces has sole nuclear strike authority, and the “football” follows him wherever he goes. A duplicate briefcase also accompanies the vice president as a backup were the commander in chief to be incapacitated or killed.
The practice of giving a backup “nuclear football” to the vice president started under Eisenhower, who was concerned about his own health and the ability to quickly respond to a possible Soviet attack. This, however, did not become relatively standard until much more recently, Fred Kaplan, author of “The Bomb: Presidents, generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, explained in a post Thursday on how close the mob came to the “football.”
The close proximity of a violent mob to Pence on Jan. 6 raises questions about whether or not a “football” was at risk.
Getting the “football” would not have been an easy task, Stephen Schwartz, a non-resident senior fellow with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a respected expert on the “football,” told Insider.
The rioters “would have had to kill all of Pence’s Secret Service agents, kill or incapacitate the military aide, and open the briefcase,” he said. “While the mob got too close to Pence for comfort that day, I think it’s unlikely anyone would have gotten that far.”
That said, if the Capitol rioters had gotten to Pence and the “football,” which contains communication tools and pre-approved nuclear strike options, it would have been a “massive and unprecedented security breach, disclosing some of the most sensitive and therefore highly classified information generated by the government,” Schwartz explained.
But other than publicly reveal them or attempt to leverage them in exchange for something, which would not be good, “there’s nothing the insurrectionists could have done with the information in the briefcase or Pence’s ‘Biscuit,'” he said, referring to the codes presidents and vice presidents carry on their person.
Pence’s “biscuit” could not have been used with the president still in command. Furthermore, the codes on that card are only authentication codes, not the launch codes carefully guarded by the Department of Defense, and there is no button or launch mechanism in the briefcase. So the rioters would not have been able to launch a nuclear strike even if they got their hands on these important tools.
Vipin Narang, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology political science professor and nuclear weapons expert, tweeted that seeing a “nuclear football” during an emergency evacuation was not the most “jarring” thing about the incident.
Former President Donald Trump, who had complete control of an active “nuclear football” and “biscuit” until noon on Jan. 20, has already been impeached by the House of Representatives for inciting the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, where Pence and lawmakers were certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.
It marked the second time he was impeached during his one-term in office.
Trump, who is accused of riling up the mob that attacked the Capitol, spoke to a crowd of his supporters just before members of that group stormed the halls of Congress.
Just before Pence was evacuated, Trump tweeted a scathing criticism of his own vice president after Pence decided to uphold his oath to the Constitution rather than push to overturn the results of the election.
Trump tweeted that “Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify.”
Speaking before the Senate as she presented video footage of the Capitol riots, Plaskett said Wednesday that the mob was there to kill Pence, lawmakers, and others, arguing that “Trump put a target on their backs” and “his mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down.”
The former president’s legal team is currently fighting allegations that he incited the riot that saw multiple people killed, including a Capitol police officer who was beaten by rioters.
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