- Jamie Fleet, a best aide to Nancy Pelosi, pondered setting up an “alternate Chamber” on January 6.
- He advised the Jan. 6 committee he inquired about it following going for walks earlier Trump supporters in combat fatigues.
- He also claimed that employees experienced planned for likely disruptions on the Home ground as votes had been counted.
Jamie Fleet, a senior adviser to Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the personnel director of the Committee on House Administration, prepared for a quantity of distinctive situations forward of the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
Fleet spoke voluntarily with the January 6 committee in March 2022, and a transcript of his interview was publicly produced — together with many many others — on Tuesday.
Between the eventualities Fleet deemed was an “alternate Chamber” for lawmakers to rely Electoral University votes if the Home Chamber was considered unsafe.
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As Fleet was walking towards the Capitol from his household on Capitol Hill soon immediately after 8 a.m. on January 6, he stated he “passed folks who appeared to me to be evidently in city for the purposes of the … joint session,” prompting him to call Tom Krietzer, an worker with the Main Administrative Place of work.
“I requested Tom at that position how very long it would get to established up an alternate Chamber if we required to,” Fleet explained to investigators, declaring it was “just a sensation in the neighborhood” that prompted the phone.
“Backpacks, Trump flags, fatigues, overcome fatigues,” he later elaborated, noting that it was also uncommon to see protestors in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. He mentioned Krietzer informed him “what it would acquire to stand up a couple on-campus rooms that could be used for legislative business enterprise.”
Ultimately, that contingency approach was not used, with Pelosi later on insisting that lawmakers finish the job of counting votes from the Home Chamber soon after the Capitol was overrun.
Fleet also informed committee investigators that planning for the joint session began in the summer months of 2020, lengthy right before the November election. “I was seeing President Trump pretty methodically lay a foundation for an argument that the election, if he was unsuccessful, was improperly made the decision,” he advised the committee.
He said that he and other workers commenced learning the Electoral Count Act — which was not too long ago revised by Congress as part of a broader authorities paying out bill — as nicely as election treatments in states that were likely to be contested.
Fleet also comprehensive a conversation he experienced with Pelosi’s main of workers, Terri McCullough, and then-Dwelling Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving on January 5 about a attainable “disruption between Associates” on the House floor, talking about how Irving may possibly mitigate it.
Irving had elevated the worry, in accordance to Fleet, primarily based on general public reporting of “some of the previous President’s supporters in the Congress who ended up intending to deliver enthusiasm to their objections.”
Though no large-scale disruptions eventually happened in the course of the session, members reportedly almost arrived to blows in the course of a discussion on Pennsylvania’s electoral votes immediately after the joint session re-convened, as Democratic Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado mentioned Republicans who had been echoing Trump’s lies about the 2020 election “must be ashamed of them selves.”
