Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff to President Joe Biden until February, on Sunday said the “scariest thing of all” about the latest indictment of Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election was “how close it came to succeeding.”
“I think it’s hard to read it and not think how close it came to all working,” Klain told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, herself a former Biden White House press secretary.
Psaki asked Klain, her former boss, to describe his concerns on Jan. 5, 2021, the day before then-Vice President Mike Pence was due to certify the 2020 election amid Trump’s intensifying pressure to overturn it.
“I was worried about an effort just to delay and postpone,” said Klain. “There was talk that former Vice President Mike Pence may not show up to preside and I wondered what that all meant if that turned out to be true. But I did not think that a mob would break into the Capitol.”
“I’ll say there were times on Jan. 6 where I was fearful that Donald Trump would not leave the office and that Joe Biden would never be sworn in as president because they would not be able to resume the tabulation of the electoral votes,” he added.
Watch the interview here:
