'I did my duty': Pence crushes Trump 'and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers' over January 6th plot

02 August 2023

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday again denied that he had the power to reject then-President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory in the 2020 election.

John Eastman, one of ex-President Donald Trump's erstwhile attorneys, is reported to be one of the six unnamed co-conspirators listed in United States Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith's four-federal-felony-count indictment against Trump for allegedly conspiring to subvert American democracy.

Smith's forty-five-page complaint quotes an email that "Co-conspirator 2" sent to Pence's legal adviser on January 4th, 2021, which stated, "I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation of the Electoral Count Act and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislators to finish their investigations and a full forensic audit of what he called the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here."

Fox News host Martha MacCallum summed that up as Trumpworld "saying all you needed to do was just take a pause" and asked Pence, "What do you say to that?"

Pence, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, recalled refusing to stop the congressional electoral vote count following the deadly insurrection at the Capitol:

I'd say that's completely false, and it's contrary to American history, to our Constitution, and to the laws of this country, and I never considered it, Martha. Look, from the first time I heard speculation that as vice president I'd have the authority to overturn the election by returning or rejecting votes, I frankly dismissed it out of hand.

Pence decried the nature of what Trump and his accused accomplices demanded:

Look, the founders of this country had just won a war of independence against the king. And I was confident as a student of American history that those founders would've never vested the vice president or anyone else with unilateral authority to decide what Electoral College votes to count and which not to count. I was clear on that throughout. I was clear with President Trump throughout all the way up to the morning of January 6th. But let's be clear on this point. It wasn't just that they asked for a pause. The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes to which would've resulted in the issue being turned over to the House of Representatives, and literally, chaos would've ensued.

Although Pence lamented that Trump was criminally charged, he nonetheless asserted that Trump was responsible for the events surrounding January 6th:

People can read the indictment and frankly, I've said before, I had hoped that it had not come to this point. You know, I don't know if the government can meet the standard, the burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt for criminal charges. But the American people deserve to know that President Trump and his advisers didn't just ask me to pause. They asked me to reject votes, return votes, essentially to overturn the election. And to keep faith with the oath that I made to the American people and to almighty god, I rejected that out of hand, and I did my duty that day.

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