J. Michael Luttig is a very conservative judge. But it appears he was quite helpful in preventing Vice President Mike Pence from overturning the 2020 presidential election.
Luttig worked as an attorney in the Reagan White House and was a clerk for Judge Antonin Scalia. He was on George W. Bush’s shortlist for appointment to the Supreme Court. And he is good friends with William Barr. In his time on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals he had two clerks that are famous now: Ted Cruz and John Eastman. After leaving the appeals court, Luttig became the general counsel for Boeing and was tapped to head the company’s legal strategy and to advise the board after the second Boeing 737 Max crashed. He retired at the same time the CEO resigned following that fiasco.
On January 5, 2021, Luttig sent out this 6-tweet twitter thread that started this way:
This thread was quoted by Mike Pence on January 6th as Pence rejected overturning the election results.
There is now an interview of Luttig by Ryan Lizza in Politico that describes how this twitter thread came to be. It also quotes Luttig saying what happened on January 4th:
… He [Richard Cullen, the vice president’s outside counsel] said, “John’s [Eastman] advising the president and the vice president that the vice president has this authority [to reject electoral votes] on January 6” — two days hence. And I said, “Wow, no, I did not know that. Well, look, you can tell the vice president that I said that he has no such authority at all. ...
Last week, Luttig wrote an oped for the New York Times: The Conservative Case for Avoiding a Repeat of Jan. 6 calling for Electoral Count Act reform.