Donald Trump tried to stop Mike Pence from testifying. Pence himself tried to avoid taking the stand. But a federal appeals court had the last word, and on Thursday the former vice president finally appeared before a grand jury investigating his old boss’s attempts to overthrow the 2020 election. It’s unclear exactly what Pence said in his testimony. But the ex-veep — and potential challenger to Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination — suggested in a CBS News interview last week that his testimony would be similar to what he recounted in his 2022 book on the matter. “We’ll tell the truth,” he told the outlet. “The story that I’ve been telling the American people all across the country, the story that I wrote in the pages of my memoir…that will be what I tell in that setting, as well.”
Pence’s promise to “tell the truth” is probably bad news for Trump. In addition to his position as Trump’s ticket-mate in the failed reelection bid, the former vice president was the subject of a pressure campaign by the former president and his allies to undermine Joe Biden’s victory and he was at the Capitol to certify the 2020 results when a MAGA mob overran the building.
“They had come to protest the result of the election and to prevent Congress from fulfilling its responsibility to open and count the Electoral College votes,” as Pence wrote in his 2022 book on the matter. “And, as I later learned, many had come looking for me.”
Pence’s recounting of the lead-up to the insurrection and its aftermath could pose a significant legal threat to the former president. Trump, who is already facing nearly three dozen felony charges in New York relating to hush-money payments he allegedly oversaw during the 2016 campaign, has insisted he is the victim of a wide-ranging political witch hunt. He’s vowed to remain in the 2024 race despite his indictment in New York, potential election meddling charges in Georgia, and investigations by special counsel Jack Smith into his efforts to subvert democracy in 2020 and his handling of classified documents after leaving office — both of which could also lead to indictments. So far, the legal peril — both on the criminal front and in civil court, where he is also facing rape accusations from writer E. Jean Carroll — has seemed to help him in the polls, rather than hurt him, with Republicans, who have mostly rallied around him as he steals oxygen from the rest of the GOP field. But there could come a point where his campaign finally starts to sink under the weight of his legal challenges, which could potentially come with jail time.
Trump, by many accounts, is deeply concerned about the prospect of ending up in prison — and, in fact, launched his reelection campaign partly because he seems to think it will keep that possibility from coming to pass. But he has been unable to stop himself from attacking Smith, his investigator. “He’s a Trump hater,” the former president said in a bizarre video Thursday, claiming that the special counsel was attempting to “obstruct and interfere with the 2020 election.” “His wife’s a Trump hater. His family is a Trump hater. They all hate Trump. They hate him with a passion. They’ll do anything they can to hurt Trump.”
“He’s a harasser and abuser,” Trump said, “of our people.”
His “people,” of course, include January 6 insurrectionists, one of whom he praised at a New Hampshire campaign stop Thursday. “You’ve been through too much,” he told Micki Larson-Olson, who was convicted on misdemeanor charges relating to the Capitol attack. “I think it’s so terrible,” he said of the prosecution of the insurrectionists — some of whom had stalked the halls of Congress chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” Asked by a reporter during that New Hampshire swing about Pence’s testimony Thursday, Trump responded vaguely: “I don’t know what he said,” he told the reporter, “but, uh, I have a lot of confidence in him.”
Eric Lutz
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