Revealed: 'Fascinating' detail about Mike Pence’s behind-the-scenes effort to stop Trump from stealing the election

The author of a new book about Donald Trump and the Republican Party revealed a "fascinating" detail he learned about vice president Mike Pence's actions ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Vanity Fair reporter David Drucker, author of the newly published book "In Trump's Shadow," told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Pence had decided that he would not help Trump overturn the election and wanted to prevent a future president from attempting the same gambit.

"The other fascinating thing for me that I learned, part of what Mike Pence set out to do when he insisted to Donald Trump that he wasn't going to throw the election, as was being requested -- and it's almost strange that we talk about it so glibly because it was such a momentous event -- is he wanted a paper trail so that if future presidents got the same idea they would already understand as a matter of constitutional law, and I use the word precedent loosely, but there was a roadmap laid out that this had been investigated and determined under the law to be something you couldn't do," Drucker said.

"We all take it for granted that the founders didn't put into the Constitution this weird back door that the vice president had the power all along to choose who won the election even if they didn't like who actually won," he added. "Mike Pence always found that preposterous, but he wanted to leave a paper trail so he had his attorney in the vice president's office research this and lay it out, not just so he could say to other Republicans, 'Look, I did my best, I tried,' because that's not what he was doing. He wanted it on paper that this was as preposterous as it sounds, and the next time somebody tried it, people could pull up these documents and say, 'Look, we've already looked into this, it doesn't work.'"