protect you behind these glass doors, and so I need to move you."[300] This time, the third, the Secret Service was not asking the Vice President to move; they were stating the fact that the Vice President must be moved.[301] At 2:20 p.m., NSC staff monitoring radio communications reported that the second floor of the Capitol and the door to the Senate Chamber "ha[ve] now been breached."[302]
At 2:25 p.m., the Secret Service rushed the Vice President, his family, and his senior staff down a flight of stairs, through a series of hallways and tunnels to a secure location.[303] The Vice President and his team stayed in that same location for the next four and a half hours.
The angry mob had come within 40 feet of the Vice President as he was evacuated.[304] President Trump never called to check on Vice President Pence's safety, so Marc Short called Mark Meadows to tell him they were safe and secure.[305] Short himself became persona non grata with President Trump. The President directed staff to revoke Short's access to the White House after Vice President Pence refused to betray his oath to the Constitution.[306] Marc Short never spoke with President Trump again.[307]
After arriving at the secure location, the head of the Vice President's Secret Service detail wanted to move the Vice President away from the Capitol, and staff hurried into the waiting vehicles. But the Vice President refused to get in the car.[308] As Greg Jacob explained in his testimony to the Select Committee:
The Vice President wouldn't get in his car. . . . [H]e was determined that unless there was imminent danger to bodily safety that he was not going to abandon the Capitol and let the rioters have a victory of having made the Vice President flee or made it difficult to restart the process later that day.[309]
It was an unprecedented scene in American history. The President of the United States had riled up a mob that hunted his own Vice President.
The Vice President's staff came to believe that the theory "pushed and sold" to the public that the Vice President had a role to play in the joint session was a cause of the attack on the Capitol. "The reason that the Capitol was assaulted was that the people who were breaching the Capitol believed that . . . the election [outcome] had not yet been determined, and, instead, there was some action that was supposed to take place in Washington, D.C., to determine it," Jacob said.[310] "I do think [the violence] was the result of that position being continuously pushed and sold to people who ended up believing that with all their hearts."[311] The people had been "told that the Vice President had the authority" to determine the outcome of the election during the joint session.[312]
