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Former VP Pence must testify in Jan. 6 probe, federal judge says

Xavier Roger

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Former Vice President Mike Pence pauses while speaking at a Coolidge and the American Project luncheon in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023, in Washington.
  • Pence, who is considering a campaign for president in 2024, has resisted testifying against Trump.
  • Pence’s aides have offered a glimpse of the pressure the former vice president faced from Trump.

WASHINGTON – A federal judge has ordered former Vice President Mike Pence to provide information to a federal grand jury as part of a Justice Department special counsel’s investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a person familiar with the matter said.

The decision, rendered as part of a sealed proceeding, represents a potentially significant blow to the former president’s claims that he did nothing wrong while urging his vice president to intervene in the certification of President Joe Biden’s election.

Pence was key to the strategy Trump adopted.

The strategy mapped out by Trump lawyer John Eastman called for Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, to reject electors from seven contested states that President Joe Biden won. Pence could then either accept alternate electors who supported Trump or send the contest to the House, where a majority of state delegations supported Trump.

Pence refused to participate. He fled the Senate chamber ahead of a mob that erected a gallows outside the Capitol and chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”

In this image released in the final report by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump talks on the phone to Vice President Mike Pence from the Oval Office of the White House on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.

Pence testimony likely to undercut Trump

In testimony before the House committee that investigated the attack, Pence aides described how Trump pressured and scolded his vice president.

Greg Jacob, Pence’s general counsel, testified that Trump called Pence the morning of Jan. 6 in a “heated” exchange. Jacob said Pence took the call privately but returned looking “steely, determined, grim.”

Greg Jacob, former counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, testifies before the House select committee to investigate the Jan.6th attack on the Capitol on June 16, 2022.

After evacuating the Senate chamber, Pence refused to get in a Secret Service car in an underground parking garage because he worried it would carry him away from the Capitol rather than finish the Electoral College vote count that night.

Pence didn’t wanted to take the chance “the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the Capitol,” Jacob said.

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