Politico:

Former President Donald Trump received bad legal advice from advisers who “were basically snake oil salesmen,” leading him to false conclusions about the power Mike Pence had to overturn the 2020 election results, the former chief of staff to the vice president, Marc Short, said Sunday.

Short’s comments come just days after Pence rebuked Trump in some of his strongest remarks to date, responding to the former president’s claim that Pence “could have overturned the election.”

President Trump is wrong. … I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence said on Friday in a speech to the conservative Federalist Society.

Short said the vice president at the time was never considering an attempt to overturn the results, and that he made this lack of authority clear to Trump from the beginning. Short definitively said “No,” when asked if the vice president was ever looking for a way to instead delay certification of the election results.

“I think unfortunately the president had many bad advisers, who were basically snake oil salesmen giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do,” Short told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But our office, you know, researched that and recognized that was never an option.”

Short said he wasn’t sure if Trump’s beliefs could be fully attributed to bad advisers or if the president was seeking the bad advice to produce the result he wanted.