A federal judge ruled that former US Vice President Mike Pence He will be brought to testify before a grand jury about conversations he had with Donald Trump Until January 6, 2021 on the day of the storming of the Capitol, according to several sources in the latest federal court ruling.
The ruling said Pence could still refuse to answer questions related to his actions on Jan. 6 itself, when he served as Senate president to confirm the 2020 presidential election. The ruling of the chief judge James Boasberg from the US District Court in Washington, D.C. is a major victory for the special counsel Jack Smith’who heads the Ministry of Justice’s investigation.
Ahead of the confirmation vote in Congress, Pence faced enormous pressure from Trump and his allies to disrupt lawmakers’ plans. Trump’s conversations with Pence in the days surrounding the storming of the Capitol were of great interest to investigators looking into the attack. Although Pence declined to testify before the January 6 House committee investigating the insurgency, people in Trump’s orbit told the committee about a heated phone call he had with Pence on the day of the attack, in which he hurled insults at the vice president.
Pence and Trump did not speak during the attack on the Capitol itself, where many of Trump’s supporters angrily sought him out, and Pence narrowly escaped the mob. Nicholas Luna, a former special assistant to Trump, told the committee that he remembers Trump saying about Pence: “Idiot, I made the wrong decision four or five years ago.”
For Pence’s part, many of his public comments about his conversations with Trump in the days before and after the uprising came in a memoir he published last year. In the book, Pence wrote that Trump told him in the days before the attack that he would incur the hatred of hundreds of thousands of people because he was “too honest” to try to overturn the election results.
Pence also wrote that Trump told him in a phone call on Rosh Hashanah: “You are too honest”, and predicted that “hundreds of thousands will hate you” and “people will think you are stupid”. “Mr. President, I have no doubt that there were irregularities and fraud,” Pence wrote because that’s what he told Trump: “It’s just a question of who decides, and according to the law it’s Congress.”
A big win for special counsel
Smith investigates Trump’s effort to undermine the 2020 election. Smith subpoenaed Pence for testimony and documents earlier this year. Days after news of the subpoena broke, Pence and his advisers indicated that the former vice president would challenge the subpoena under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which protects lawmakers from certain law enforcement actions related to their legislative duties.
“I’m going to fight the summons of Joe Biden to appear before the grand jury, because I believe it’s unconstitutional and unprecedented.” That’s what Pence said at the event in February. He suggested that because he also served as president of the Senate during the confirmation vote on January 6, the constitutional clause protects him from the conduct that investigators are looking into.
Pence’s claims have drawn criticism from a wide range of legal scholars, including former Justice Michael Luttig, a conservative jurist who has publicly argued that Pence should certify the election results. Even as Pence fought the subpoena, he insisted on his refusal to disrupt congressional confirmation of Biden’s win, as Trump had urged him to do.