Pence has ‘no plans’ to testify against Trump — unless he has to
Former Vice President Mike Pence has “no plans” to testify against former President Donald Trump if he goes to trial for alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but noted that he will “respond to the call of the law.”
“I have no plans to testify, but people can be confident we’ll — we’ll obey the law,” Pence said during an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” which aired Sunday. “We’ll respond to the call of the law if it comes and we’ll just tell the truth.”
The 45-page federal indictment unveiled against Trump Tuesday details the lengths to which the former president and his allies allegedly went to try to seize a second term. In months leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump pressured Pence to refuse to certify President Joe Biden’s electoral votes. According to the indictment — and an excerpt from Pence’s book, “So Help Me God” — Trump told Pence that “you’re too honest” when Pence balked at the idea that he could block Biden’s victory.
The indictment also reveals that Pence kept contemporaneous notes of some of his conversations with Trump during the days leading up to Jan. 6, including a Dec. 29, 2020 conversation during which Trump falsely told him that the Justice Department was finding “major infractions” related to election fraud, according to the indictment.
Pence said Sunday that while he “didn't make a practice of taking notes in meetings over the four-year period of time” he served as vice president, “There was from time to time, particularly at important moments, I had a practice of scribbling a note or two on my calendar just to memorialize it and remember it and I did that in this case.”
Pence notably refused to testify in front of the Jan. 6 select committee, describing the congressional panel investigating the events leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as “partisan” in the interview Sunday. The former vice president also initially fought efforts to get him to appear before the grand jury investigating Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, though he ultimately complied with the subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith.
Now, that testimony has propelled Pence into the spotlight — and he’s leaning into it as he looks to gain momentum in the Republican presidential primary race. His campaign is already selling hats and shirts that read “Too Honest,” and in recent days he’s leveled his strongest condemnations against Trump and his co-conspirators, calling Trump’s allies “a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear,” and saying in the hours after the charges were announced that “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States,”
The new lines of attack spurred reaction from Trump, who took to social media to blast his former running mate for having “gone to the dark side.”
“I never told a newly emboldened … Pence to put me above the Constitution, or that Mike was ‘too honest.’ He’s delusional, and now he wants to show he’s a tough guy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Despite attacks from Trump and at the risk of further alienating the MAGA base in the presidential primary, Pence has remained firm in his decision not to stop the certification of the election.
“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 told CBS’ Major Garrett. “I had no such authority.”