(DCWatchdog.com) – Former Vice President Mike Pence, a 2024 GOP presidential nomination hopeful, has stated that his former boss, then-President Donald Trump, asked him to “reject” the 2020 presidential election results.
Pence spoke on the CNN program “State of the Union” over the weekend, days after the Biden Justice Department indicted Trump for supposedly attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
He once again rejected the idea that the vice president, as president of the US Senate, had the power to refuse to certify an election.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the former president’s lawyers saying that he, quote, ultimately asked only that you pause in counting the electoral ballots. I want to be clear. Did the former president ask you to pause, or did he at any point ask you to overturn the election and keep him as president?” CNN host Dana Bash asked Pence.
The former vice president responded by saying one could look at “the tweets and public statements that the president made, all the way up to the night before and the morning of.”
“What the president was convinced, it seemed to me in December, that I had some right to reject or return electoral votes, even though no vice president in American history had ever asserted that right. No vice president or any one president has ever had the right to choose the American president. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone,” Pence declared.
He pointed out the role of Trump’s attorneys in the developments between the 2020 election and January 6, 2021.
“In the days before, the president was talking about us rejecting votes, then late in the process, his lawyers suggested that we return votes to the states,” the former vice president said.
“But, frankly, the day before January 6, if memory serves, they came back, his lawyers did, and said, ‘We want you to reject votes outright.’ They were asking me to overturn the election. I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence added.
“I know we did our duty that day, and I couldn’t be more encouraged… [by] how many people come up to me and express their appreciation for the stand that we took,” he concluded.
