He started the day with a prayer.

Vice-President Mike Pence, preparing to withstand the final stage of a relentless campaign by President Donald J. Trump to force him to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, began January 6, 2021, surrounded by aides at his official residence at the Naval Observatory, asking God for guidance.

The group was expecting a difficult day. But what followed over the next 12 hours was more harrowing than they imagined.

An angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray chanting “hang Mike Pence” came within 40 feet of the vice president. Pence’s Secret Service detail had to hustle him to safety and hold him for nearly five hours in the bowels of the Capitol.

Trump called Pence a “wimp” and worse in a coarse and abusive call that morning from the Oval Office, Trump’s daughter and former White House aides testified.

And a confidential witness who travelled to Washington with the Proud Boys, the most prominent of the far-Right groups that helped lead the assault on the Capitol, later told investigators the group would have killed Pence — and Speaker Nancy Pelosi — if they got the chance.

Those were among the extraordinary new details that emerged during the third public hearing held n Thursday by the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 Attack on the US Capitol.

Pence’s day dawned as it often did.

The vice-president, whose evangelical faith was a selling point for adding him to the presidential ticket in 2016 but often a source of scepticism for Trump, was joined by three people in prayer: his chief counsel, Greg Jacob; his chief of staff, Marc Short; and his director of legislative affairs, Chris Hodgson.

Pence and the team had been subjected to a barrage of demands from Trump that the vice-president refuse to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr’s Electoral College victory in a joint session of Congress — an unconstitutional action never before taken in the two and a half centuries since the nation’s founding.

“We just asked for guidance and wisdom, knowing the day was going to be a challenging one,” Short said in videotaped testimony played by the committee.

(New York Times News Service)