The effort relied in large part on Pence accepting fake slates of electors for Trump – now a major part of the criminal investigation – to create a pretext for suggesting the results of the election were somehow in doubt and stop Biden from being pronounced president. Starting weeks after the 2020 election, Trump tried to cajole Pence into helping him reverse his defeat by using his largely ceremonial role of the presiding officer of the Senate on 6 January to reject the legitimate Biden slates of electors and prevent his certification. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. But Trump’s legal team disagreed, and filed the emergency motion that was denied late on Wednesday by judges Gregory Katsas, Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins. The former vice-president’s team declined to challenge the ruling. Still, Boasberg ruled that speech or debate protections did not shield him from testifying about any instances of potential criminality. The subpoena came under immediate challenges from Trump’s lawyers, who invoked executive privilege to limit the scope of Pence’s testimony, as well as from Pence’s lawyer, who argued his role as president of the Senate on 6 January meant he was protected from legal scrutiny by the executive branch.īoth requests to limit the scope of Pence’s testimony were largely denied by the new chief US judge for the court James Boasberg, who issued a clear-cut denial to Trump and a more nuanced ruling to Pence that upheld that he was protected in part by speech or debate protections.
The government has been trying to get Pence’s testimony for months, starting with requests from the justice department last year and then through a grand jury subpoena issued by Smith, who inherited the complicated criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to stay in power.
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His appearance came the morning after the US court of appeals for the DC circuit rejected an emergency legal challenge seeking to block Pence’s testimony on executive privilege grounds, and Trump ran out of road to take the matter to the full DC circuit or the supreme court. Pence had privately suggested to advisers that he would provide as complete an account as possible of what took place inside and outside the White House in the weeks leading up to the 6 January Capitol attack, as well as how Trump had been told his plans could violate the law. The two interactions are of particular investigative interest to Smith as his office examines whether Trump sought to unlawfully obstruct the certification and defrauded the United States in seeking to overturn the 2020 election results. Pence is considered a major witness in the criminal investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, since Trump pressured him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden at the joint session of Congress, and was at the White House meeting with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win. His appearance is a moment of constitutional consequence and potential legal peril for the former president.
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