Mike Pence is the key to Donald Trump’s political future. The billionaire’s former vice president is clearing the daisy-papers on whether to start the 2024 election race and run against his former boss, but he’s also a key part in the investigations that could determine Trump’s primaries and legal consequences.
Pence was questioned this week before a grand jury set up by Special Counsel Jack Smith charged with investigating Trump’s campaign to remain in power despite his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
His appearance followed a grueling, months-long process in which Pence tried to balance making good on his commitments and not angering Trump and his constituency, the group of superpowers within the incumbent Republican Party.
Pence refused to testify before the House committee that last year investigated Trump’s role in that effort to reverse the results and in the violent assault on the Capitol that was the culmination of that campaign.
This is despite the fact that there are few who have more to say about those rings than a penny. For weeks, he was under a lot of pressure from Trump and his entourage to make decisions that would help the then-president stay in the White House. Pence, like any vice president, presides over the Senate and it was Trump’s request that he stop certification in Congress of the results that gave Biden the winner on Jan. 6.
Then Pence became an enemy of Trumpism. “You’re going to look like a weakling,” Trump warned him on the morning of January 6, as Pence recounted in his memoirs. “If I did, I made a huge mistake five years ago,” he told her of his refusal to avoid testifying, and added with his choice of the “presidential ticket.”
In fact, Trump and Pence have always been an odd pair. Trump chose him, an incorrigible flirt married for the third time to a Slovenian model, to reassure and convince traditional conservative voters of his intentions. For Pence, the vice president made it easier for him to enter the White House in the future.
betrayal’
Pence’s “betrayal” for not following through on his demands—which would have seen him violate the Constitution, potentially ending up in court—made him an enemy of “supremacy.” A crowd of Trump supporters who entered the Capitol cheered, while the president attacked him on Twitter, stressing that he did not have the “guts” to “do what needs to be done.”
It was learned last year that he was negotiating with the Justice Department to testify about that campaign, but it didn’t pan out. Finally, Plaintiff Smith sent a request for grand jury examination this past February. Pence fought that in part — his lawyers argued that his conversations as Senate president would be protected — and Trump tried every way to prevent that from happening, arguing that all of his conversations with the former vice president are protected by executive privilege.
Finally, after several appeals were denied, Pence went to Washington on Thursday and made an appearance Almost five hours. The content of his testimony is confidential and no details have been leaked. Publicly, the former vice president has always compensated for criticism of Trump’s actions — he has said his rhetoric was “reckless” and that he put his life, the lives of his family and other members of Congress in danger “with doubts about Trump’s criminal liability: “I don’t know if it’s okay to listen to bad advice from your lawyers.” criminal.”
In any case, his testimony to the jury comes at a critical time for Pence. With Trump surging in the polls after his recent indictment and arrest in New York, he has to decide whether or not to run for president. He has already said that if he does, it will be soon, before the end of June. At the moment, he hardly has support in opinion polls, only 6%.
