For most of his life, J. Michael Luttig has operated behind the scenes at the top of the conservative legal world. He started his career as a young aide at the U.S. Supreme Court, worked as an attorney in the Reagan White House, clerked for Judge Antonin Scalia before he was a legal icon, helped guide the appointment of two other Supreme Court justices and was appointed to a federal judgeship by former President George H.W. Bush.
During Luttig’s time on the bench, one of his clerks was a young attorney named John Eastman. In recent months, Eastman’s name has become inextricably tied to the legal advice he offered to then-President Donald Trump in December 2020 and January 2021: In a now-infamous legal memo, Eastman argued that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the ability to discard certified electoral votes from contested states — a notion that has been roundly debunked, but which Trump’s closest allies clung to (and which helped to inspire some of his supporters to storm the Capitol in rage).
That story is, by now, well known. But there’s another part of the story — one that hasn’t been told until now.
Today, in his first in-depth interview on the topic, Luttig shares the story of those days before the insurrection, when he was unknowingly enlisted to help Pence reject Trump’s efforts on Jan. 6.
For “Playbook Deep Dive,” Ryan Lizza talks with Luttig about his advice to Pence then, what needs to be done to rewrite the Electoral Count Act now and why he’s choosing this moment to make his legal commentary loud, clear and very public — in panel discussions and op-eds in publications like The New York Times….
Lizza: Wait a second. You’re in the position here where the vice president is being pressured by the president of the United States to overturn the results of the election. And you’re the go-to legal mind who’s respected among Republicans that the vice president is looking to to essentially stop a coup. Do I have that right?
Luttig: To answer the question you’re asking: I understood the gravity of the moment and the momentous task that I was being asked to help the vice president with. I had been following all of this very closely in the days leading up to it. It was then — and may forever be — one of the most significant moments in American history. I’m a cut up, but I’m deadly serious when the time comes, and that day, I was as serious as I can possibly be.
Lizza: But first, you’ve got to learn how to tweet.
Luttig:So my son … well, first off, he says, “Dad, I don’t have time for this. You’ve got to learn this stuff on your own. … I’m busy.” To which I said something like, “Just tell me right now how to get this done, or I’ll cut you out of the will.”
The only thing I knew how to do was type out in prose all I wanted to say. Well, that was like 10 tweets [long]. So I go down to my office, and I open up the [Twitter] instructions on my laptop and I copy and paste what I’ve written on my iPhone into my laptop into a Word document, and then I set about to divide it up into 180-character tweets. I read it and reread it multiple times and then, I take a deep breath and I hit “tweet.”
Almost immediately, reporters started calling me: “Judge, what are you doing?” And I say, “What do you mean?” And they said, “You didn’t just tweet what you just tweeted for no reason.” And … I said, “If I tweeted this for a reason, I would not be at liberty to tell you.” Minutes later, The New York Times ran the tweet…