Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville is defending his account of a phone call he had with Donald Trump during the Capitol riot after attorneys for the ex- president dismissed it as ‘hearsay”.
In the call, Tuberville told the former president that Mike Pence was being evacuated from the Senate chamber for safety reasons.
“I said ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,’” Tuberville told Politico.
The Tuberville call was just one example House impeachment managers use to show that Trump remained fixated on stopping Biden’s victory even as it became clear that a mob devoted to him was ransacking the Capitol. Trump, they said, did nothing to publicly call off the rioters and instead called Tuberville to continue his effort to stop the transition of power.
During the impeachment trial on Friday Trump’s lawyer Michael van see Veen dismissed Tuberville’s account as hearsay while answering a question from Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy about when Trump knew Pence was in danger.
“Unfortunately, we’re not going to know the answer to the facts in this proceeding because the House did nothing to investigate what went on,” he said. “We’re trying to get hearsay from Mr. Tuberville. There was hearsay from Mr. Lee, I think it was two nights ago, when we ended, where Mr. Lee was accused of making a statement that he never made.”
Tuberville defended his account on Friday after the trial:
“[Lee] brought me the phone. It said ‘White House’ on it. I didn’t know who it was. Answered it, it was the president. He said a few things. I said, ‘Mr. president, they’ve taken the vice president out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go.'”
I’m “probably the only guy in the world who hung up on the president of the United States,” Tuberville added.
