The Donald Trump Legacy of the January 6, 2016 Intifad: Why he’s afraid of the 2020 election and what we can do about it
Former Vice President Mike Pence wrote in his new memoir that former President Donald Trump warned him days before the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol that he would inspire the hatred of hundreds of thousands of people because he was “too honest” to attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
In the White House, where there was a constant controversy that defined the administrations, vice president pence had a loyal following, but he has criticized his former boss in the past, most notably after the January 6 riot, when Trump supporters chanted to hang the then-vice president.
Russia interfered in the 2016 election, but Pence insisted it wasn’t the election of a Trump presidency and that it was a campaign to sow distrust and division in the US.
The former vice president has been coy about his plans for 2024. He would face strong opposition in the primary if he were to run for the GOP nomination, and he wouldn’t have the support of Trump’s supporters. Trump is set to announce his 2024 campaign on Tuesday, former adviser Jason Miller said in a podcast appearance.
On the Saturday after the election, he said, Trump’s top aide and son-in-law contacted him to ask if there had been fraud in the election. He told Kushner there likely was some fraud, but he doubted it was why they’d lost, according to the book.
“You know, what I can tell you is I have every confidence that the Republican Party is going to sort out leadership,” Pence said last month, adding that his focus was on the midterm elections.
Pence is set to participate in a CNN town hall on Wednesday, the day after the release of his forthcoming autobiography “So Help Me God.” The town hall with CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper is going to take place in New York City.
Asked by ABC News’ David Muir if he believes he can defeat Trump, who is expected to announce a 2024 campaign for the White House on Tuesday, Pence replied: “Well, that would be for others to say, and it’d be for us to decide whether or not we’d want to test that.”
A Conversation between Trump and Pence during the January 6 Associated Democrat riots: A Memorandum of the Vice President and the Secret Service
The former vice president, who was at the Capitol on January 6 as the violence unfolded, said he “felt no fear. I was angry about what I saw.
They walked us with the Suburban open on either side for the motorcade. They put vehicles on the ramp. I turned to my Secret Service leader and told him I wasn’t getting in that car. I just assumed that if we got in the car and close those 200-pound doors that not my team in the loading dock, but that somebody maybe back at Secret Service headquarters would simply give the driver an order to go,” Pence recalled.
I didn’t want those rioters to see the vice president’s motorcade. I didn’t want them to be happy.
Pence wrote that he told Trump he was praying for him and encouraged him to pray. When Trump didn’t say anything initially, Pence said, and then responded with “genuine sadness”, he wondered what if we had not had the rally. What if they didn’t go to the Capitol?
One of the key themes of the House’s January 6 committee hearings was the conversations between Trump and Pence, and the book gives the vice president the chance to weigh in on his exchanges with Trump.
Pence said that he’d begun election night in 2020 confident, but things changed later in the evening, he wrote, when results in states with large shares of mail-in ballots “began to shift” and the Trump-Pence ticket’s lead “started to vanish.”
He watched as Trump claimed in his speech that the election was a fraud on the American public and said the days that followed the election were a little like the twilight zone.
In the lead-up to the congressional certification vote, Pence faced enormous pressure from Trump and his allies to disrupt lawmakers’ plans to validate Joe Biden’s win. The Senate’s president was required to preside over the certification proceedings.
He was annoyed when he said that he did not have a good team at the White House. “If the president had chosen to listen to those good men and not the gaggle of outside lawyers who took over the election challenges from the campaign, things would have been very different.”
It was Pence who wrote about how Trump told him he was too honest and that people would think he was stupid.
The president implied that was what I lacked when he said it probably just took courage. “I paused before replying and, facing him from my seat in front of the Resolute Desk, said firmly, ‘Mr. President, I have courage, and you know that.’”
At the Southeast Asian conference in Singapore, where the United States was represented, vice president wrote that he was approached by Russian President Putin and that he was forced to tap on his shoulder.
Pence wrote that it was “absolutely right” for the FBI to investigate claims of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, but pushed back on the idea “the investigation was into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia and into Trump himself.”
He said he thought the president felt that acknowledging Russian interference would cheapen the victory. There was no reason for Trump to not call out Russia for their actions, it was just a declaration of what the intelligence services had been up to. I had nothing to worry about calling Russia out.
The former vice president said that he had been approached by the North Korean government about a meeting.
He remembered that Moon arranged for the North Koreans to be seated at the head table of the reception and banquet for the two hundred national leaders in attendance, as well as a group photograph at the start of the banquet. Pence and former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe intentionally arrived late to the banquet and did not participate in the group photo.
The Vice President of the Departments of Defense and Health, Mike Pence, and the Case of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a correct according to the Vice President, who claimed that he didn’t understand why Fauci insisted that Covid-19 had not emerged from a Chinese lab.
The man was praised by the man, writing that he was glad he was there. Mitch McConnell advised me that Fauci would be a good addition to the team due to his stature and that he was a reassuring voice to the public.
“Trump is from Queens, Fauci from Brooklyn, and Fauci was not put off by Trump’s New York brashness. He had been around it for a long time. He is a brash New Yorker, too,” Pence wrote.
They both fought hard when attacked and were sharp-elbowed. I always believed that McCain would eventually become friends if he were still alive.
He also made clear that he still resents the terminally ill McCain’s return to the Senate floor to cast the vote that would doom the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“In a fitting twist, immediately after McCain voted down Obamacare repeal, Rand Paul blocked consideration of the fiscal-year spending for the Departments of Defense, Energy, and State, which was nicknamed the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act,” Pence wrote. Trump was happy. McCain was angry. He actually said, ‘It is unfortunate that one senator chose to block consideration of a bill our nation needs right now.’ Takes one to know another.
At an event in February, Vice President Mike Pence said that he was going to fight the Biden DOJ subpoena for him to appear before the grand jury. He has suggested that – because he was also serving as president of the Senate during the January 6 certification vote – the constitutional clause covered the conduct that investigators are looking at.
Executive privilege is a legal protection for the president of the United States that allows him to keep private communications from Congress and courts.
“At its core, it’s the idea that some documents and some information — if it were disclosed — would damage, harm the public interest or harm the country in some way,” explained Jonathan Shaub, a former Justice Department official who is now a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law.
Legal experts say that the president’s advisers can give candid advice without being afraid of losing their jobs because of the protection.
The idea dates from the Nixon administration when a special prosecutor in the Watergate break-in investigation subpoenaed President Richard Nixon for tapes and transcripts of conversations.
Although the court ruled against Nixon, it ultimately found that there is confidentiality interest in communications between a president and their senior-most advisers. But, the court specified, there’s one very clear limit — executive privilege does not apply when the communications are relevant to a criminal investigation.
The Supreme Court was interested in Nixon’s case because there was a need for evidence to support the criminal charges against him.
Comments on mike Penence’s Sentiment to the Jan. 6 Capitol Attack: Implications for Congressional Appropriateness
Legal experts say that most disputes over executive privilege have been resolved through compromise between those requesting the documents and those providing them.
The issue arose repeatedly during the House committee’s investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee subpoenaed numerous Trump aides and advisers, several of whom refused to testify on the basis of executive privilege. (The DOJ brought criminal charges for two of those advisers: One, Steve Bannon, was found guilty of contempt of Congress after his refusal to testify. The contempt case against the other is expected to happen this year.
Last year, a court ruled against Trump in his attempts to block the release of documents related to Jan. 6.
The former president has also tried to use executive privilege to block testimony to a federal grand jury, but those efforts have been less successful, the New York Times has reported.
Victoria Nourse is a former DOJ official and also served as chief counsel to the vice President of the United States under Joe Biden. Congressional subpoenas are difficult to enforce because of the lengthy process to get a judge to enforce them.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/11/1156205144/mike-pence-subpoena-executive-privilege
A Superior Court Order Ordering the Exclusion of a Justice-Penal Power in the Presidency of the 2016 January 6 Referendum
The former vice president can’t assert executive privilege. That power lies with the executive — in other words, Trump. That’s noteworthy, as the two men have not had the smoothest of relationships when it comes to the events of Jan. 6.
A fight in court could follow if Trump decides to assert executive privilege. There is no executive privilege when it comes to a crime. She said the question was how far they wanted to go and if they wanted a judge to adjudicate it.
It is not clear how long it will take for the proceedings to be sealed or if it will be appealed to the US Supreme Court.
Smith has a reputation for moving quickly, and he accelerated the probe’s pace since he took over.
The judge said in the ruling that he could not refuse to answer questions related to his actions in January, when he was the president of the Senate.
The former vice president asserts that because he was also acting as president of the Senate that day, he is shielded by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which protects lawmakers from certain law enforcement actions targeted at their legislative conduct.
A judge ordered the former Vice President to appear before a grand jury to testify about conversations he had with the then-president leading up to January 6.
The ruling from chief judge James Boasberg of the US District Court in Washington, DC, adds to more than a dozen wins for special counsel Jack Smith forcing witnesses to testify to the grand jury, and is unusual in that it delves into the powers of the vice presidency as well as separation of powers. Pence still has the ability to appeal.
The team for the former vice president is reviewing the requirements of his testimony going forward, he said in an interview with Newsmax on Tuesday.
The High-Energy Investigation of Donald Trump and Michael Cohen: On the Investigation of a Hush Money Scheme for Paying Daniels Money
While many of Trump’s supporters were angry with him for not speaking in the attack on the Capitol, the other man escaped a mob on the Senate floor.
And Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s former chief of staff, said she recalled Ivanka Trump telling her that “her dad had just had an upsetting conversation with the vice president.”
Pence’s claims, as he has described them publicly, are seen as novel. His arguments attracted criticism from a broad range of legal scholars and one of them was Judge Michael Luttig, who publicly argued that Pence should certify the electoral results.
His statements led to a lot of speculation on the state of the grand jury investigating Trump’s role in a scheme to pay Daniels money.
A majority of the grand jury needs to agree with prosecutors in order to indict Trump. The standard of proof is lower in a grand jury than it is in a trial jury.
No. Trump posted on his social media to predict he would be arrested last Tuesday, along with a call for his supporters to protest that echoed his comments after he lost the 2020 election in the lead-up to January 6.
He is still angry against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is investigating him in Washington, DC, and Georgia. He warned that the arrest would lead to potential death and destruction.
“The new weapon being used by out of control, unhinged Democrats to cheat on elections is criminally investigating a candidate,” Trump said at a rally in Waco, Texas, on Saturday.
Bragg is investigating Trump over the reimbursement of a $130,000 payment Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election for her silence about an alleged affair with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the affair.
Last week, the district attorney’s investigation appeared to be nearing an end following testimony on March 20 from Robert Costello, who testified on Trump’s behalf to try to undercut Cohen, the prosecution’s key witness.
David Pecker was taken into and out of the Manhattan courthouse building on Monday afternoon. He was a central player in the hush money payment scheme, helping to negotiate the payment as then-chairman of American Media Inc. AMI has signed a non-prosecution agreement with prosecutors.
The testimony of Pecker suggests the district attorney might have felt the need to rebut the testimony of an individual who claimed Cohen made the payment himself.
The Awakening of the Trump Indictment: What will the public learn about a possible investigation into Mar-a-Lago?
There is hardly any idea how the public would learn about the charges, and there is no indication as to whether Trump will get the news on his social media.
There are multiple law enforcement agencies working on a security plan for a potential Trump indictment in Manhattan.
What Bragg has made clear is that the public will know what happens: he’s pledged to publicly state whether or not Trump is going to be charged once the investigation has concluded.
After Trump tried to prevent Evan from testifying, he was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury, where he was expected to answer questions about the investigation into Mar-a-Lago.
In addition to the special counsel’s pair of investigations, a special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, wrapped up an investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election earlier this year. District Attorney Fani Willis believes that indictments could be coming this spring.