Two speakers immediately preceded Trump on stage that day: Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, legal advisers to Trump who made the case that Pence could and should prevent the counting of slates of certified Electoral College votes that day.

"Every single thing that has been outlined as the plan for today is perfectly legal," Giuliani said at the rally. He continued (emphasis added):

I have Professor Eastman here with me to say a few words about that. He's one of the preeminent constitutional scholars in the United States. It is perfectly appropriate given the questionable constitutionality of the Election Counting Act [sic] of 1887 that the Vice President can cast it aside and he can do what a president called Jefferson did when he was vice president. He can decide on the validity of these crooked ballots, or he can send it back to the legislatures -- give them five to 10 days to finally finish the work.

When Eastman spoke that day, he echoed Giuliani's claims regarding the conspiracy theory that voting machines had fraudulently changed the vote tallies in Georgia. "We now know, because we caught it live last time in real time, how the machines contributed to that fraud," Eastman said of the Georgia Senate and 2020 presidential-election results. "They put those ballots in a secret folder in the machines, sitting there waiting until they know how many they need."

As for the electoral-vote tally at the Capitol, Eastman made the case that "all we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o'clock he let the legislatures of the states look into this so that we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not! We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can't get the answer to this question!"

But Eastman now tells National Review in an interview that the first of the two strategies Giuliani highlighted on stage -- having Pence reject electoral votes -- was not "viable" and would have been "crazy" to pursue.

What makes that admission remarkable is that Eastman was the author of the now-infamous legal memo making the case that Pence had that very power -- that the vice president was the "ultimate arbiter" of deciding whether to count Electoral College votes.

The two-page memo written by Eastman proposed that Pence reject certified Electoral College votes and then either declare Trump the winner or invalidate enough votes to send the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans controlled a majority of delegations. That memo was first published in September in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's book Peril.