Former Vice President Mike Pence stated that he has “no plans” to testify against former President Donald Trump in the event that he goes to trial for alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but that he will “respond to the call of the law.”
Pence told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which aired on Sunday, “I have no plans to testify, but people can be confident we’ll — we’ll obey the law.” If the police come knocking, we’ll answer the door and tell them what we know to be true.
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday released a 45-page indictment against Trump, detailing the alleged lengths to which the former president and his aides went in their pursuit of a second term in office. Trump had been pressuring Pence for months before to the January 6 Capitol riot to refuse to certify President Joe Biden’s electoral votes. The indictment claims, citing an excerpt from Pence’s book “So Help Me God,” that Trump told Pence, “you’re too honest” when Pence objected to the concept that he could prevent Biden’s election.
According to the indictment, Pence kept contemporaneous notes of some of his conversations with Trump in the days leading up to January 6. This includes a conversation from December 29, 2020, in which Trump allegedly lied to Pence about the Justice Department finding “major infractions” related to election fraud.
The former vice president said on Sunday that he “didn’t make a practise of taking notes in meetings over the four-year period of time” he served in that role. However, he added, “There was from time to time, particularly at important moments, I had a practise of scribbling a note or two on my calendar just to memorialise it and remember it and I did that in this case.”
Pence famously declined to testify before the January 6 select committee, calling the congressional panel looking into the events leading up to the violence in the Capitol on January 6 “partisan” in an interview on Sunday. Even though he eventually agreed with special counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena, the former vice president originally resisted efforts to compel him to come before the grand jury examining Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election.
Pence’s testimony has catapulted him into the limelight, and he’s making the most of his newfound fame to bolster his standing in the Republican presidential primary. Already, his campaign is selling hats and shirts with the slogan “Too Honest,” and he has been extremely critical of both Trump and his conspirators in the days since the charges were announced. He has described Trump’s allies as “a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear,” and he said that “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”
Angered by these new lines of attack, Trump rushed to Twitter to criticise his former running mate for having “gone to the dark side.”
To paraphrase, “I never told a newly confident… Pence to put me above the Constitution or that Mike was ‘too honest.'” Trump commented on Truth Social, “He’s delusional, and now he wants to show he’s a tough guy.”
Pence has stood steadfast in his refusal to halt the certification of the election, despite accusations from Trump and the risk of further alienating the MAGA camp in the presidential primary.
“From sometime in the middle of December, the president began to be told that I had some authority to reject or return votes back to the states,” he said to CBS’ Major Garrett. “I was not authorised to do so.”
Pence said this during an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday’s “State of the Union,” adding that Trump never told him during the pressure campaign that he thought he lost the 2020 election.
Pence was asked if Trump had ever told him that he believed he had lost his reelection attempt, and he responded, “I don’t recall the president ever telling me that.” I don’t know what he was thinking or why he did what he did, but I did what he and his lawyers requested me to do. Furthermore, this is something that no other American vice president has ever done.