As the House select committee examining the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol gains steam, one of the strangest arguments floated in Donald Trump’s defense has been this one: Whatever Trump might have done, he truly believed the election was stolen from him, and was merely using available processes to try to set things right.

But new evidence undercuts this idea, by shedding more light on the truly corrupt nature of Trump’s coup attempt. The latest information suggests Trump and/or his co-conspirators understood that in trying to get his vice president to subvert Joe Biden’s electors in Congress, they were knowingly pressing Mike Pence to violate his official duty.

The latest developments concern lawyer John Eastman, author of the infamous coup memo. That memo argued that Pence had the power to invalidate electors, and urged Pence to use that power to delay the electoral count, kicking the election back to the states, which would then potentially send sham electors for Trump.

Politico’s Kyle Cheney has a new report that deciphers some of the details involved in this push. As Cheney notes, Pence’s counsel, Greg Jacob, has testified to the Jan. 6 committee about his conversations with Eastman. In them, Jacob resisted Eastman’s demands of Pence and the legal theory underlying them.

The key revelation here is that Jacob’s testimony to the committee suggests Eastman may have fully understood he was pushing Pence to do something wildly corrupt. And Eastman was seemingly operating on Trump’s behalf, as Trump and Eastman collaborated to pressure Pence.

In that testimony, Jacob noted that he explicitly told Eastman that his scheme would violate the Electoral Count Act of 1887, or ECA, which governs the count of electoral votes. Jacob insisted correctly that the ECA gives the vote-counting role to Congress.

Eastman, of course, argued in his coup memo that the ECA is likely unconstitutional. Indeed, this was part of the basis for his claim that Pence had the power to invalidate electors. But that’s based on a deeply contrived legal theory and tortured reading of history that Eastman himself has since moved toward disavowing.

Importantly, Jacob has now testified that Eastman essentially “acknowledged” in their conversations that his proposal for Pence “would violate provisions of the Electoral Count Act” in multiple ways.

Again, at the time Eastman was arguing that the ECA was not binding on Pence. But Jacob also testified that in their back-and-forth, Eastman “ultimately acknowledged” that not a single justice on the Supreme Court, even the conservative ones, would uphold his position.

If so, that sure sounds like someone who didn’t think much of his own legal theory.

“These lines in Jacobs’ testimony strongly suggest that Eastman knew at the time that the legal positions he was pushing were frivolous, and he did it anyway,” legal scholar Matthew Seligman, an expert on the ECA, told us.

This suggests Trump’s co-conspirators “weren’t merely mistaken about the law or even delusional,” Seligman continued. It may be reasonable, he said, to suspect that “they were knowingly and intentionally pressuring Pence to violate his constitutional duty.” Eastman didn’t return an email for comment.

All this raises another point: Presumably Pence could testify compellingly to what he himself understood he was being pressured to do. He could speak to the notion that Trump and his allies were pressuring him to commit an astoundingly corrupt act.

The larger context here is that Pence has been slowly distancing himself from Trump. He recently said, “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin,” a clear shot at Trump’s praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin amid his invasion of Ukraine.

But will this distancing from Trump extend to Pence telling us the full truth about his experience throughout that horrible saga? This could be very powerful, not least because it would come from someone who was a devoted servant of Trump.

This is testimony Pence could offer to the American public. He’s free to tell the whole story at any time.

Whatever else you think of Pence, on Jan. 6 he performed his duty to the country. But completing that duty requires him to take one last step, and this may be the biggest one of all.