“This was not a coup directed at the president,” Raskin said during a Georgetown University event. “It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and against the Congress.”

Pence, along with his wife and daughter, was rushed to an underground Senate loading dock when a largely pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and disrupted the process over which the vice president was presiding: Congress meeting to certify the 2020 election results. Pence’s Secret Service detail, including one agent carrying a nuclear football, was “presumably” reporting to Trump’s Secret Service agents when the vice president rejected their effort to “spirit him off of the campus,” Raskin said.

Pence “uttered what I think are the six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far: ‘I’m not getting in that car'” until the Electoral College votes were counted, Raskin said. “He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do,” he added.