Trump’s Lawyer Tells ABC Mike Pence ‘Will Be One of Our Best Witnesses at Trial’… Just as Ex-VP Undercuts Their Defense on Multiple Networks
Donald Trump’s attorney said he would welcome Mike Pence’s testimony for the coming trial on the ex-president’s attempts to overturn the election, even as the former vice president offered a dire glimpse of what that testimony would look like.
John Lauro ran the Sunday show gamut in defense of Trump after special counsel Jack Smith indicted him over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. When Lauro spoke with ABC News George Stephanopoulos, the conversation began with Pence’s recent recollections of how Trump and his team tried to pressure the ex-veep into advancing their scheme to overturn Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden.
Despite Pence’s rebukes of Trump’s schemes, Lauro declared that “Mike Pence will be one of our best witnesses at trial.”
“Based on what Vice President Pence will say, the government will never be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump had corrupt or criminal intent,” Lauro argued. Stephanopoulos countered by pointing out that “What Mike Pence has said all this week is that what President Trump did was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, and he was pressing him to do something that was wrong.”
This led to Lauro and Stephanopoulos to argue about whether Pence’s comments have painted Trump’s actions as constitutionally inappropriate or liable for criminality. The interview went on with Lauro saying “I cannot wait until I have the opportunity to cross-examine” Pence, but he repeatedly refused to say if Trump will take the stand under oath.
While Lauro has his ideas on how Pence’s future testimony might go, the Republican presidential candidate spoke with CNN’s Dana Bash, and he presented a retort to the defense argument which pointed to Team Trump’s fraudulent pursuits.
What the president was convinced, it seemed to me in December, was that I had some right to reject or return electoral votes, even though no vice president in American history had ever asserted that right. And no vice president or any one person has ever had the right to choose the American president. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone. But, look, 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, 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 also spoke with CBS’ Major Garrett on Face The Nation, where he was questioned about Trump’s lawyers arguing that Trump merely asked him to delay the election certification. Pence rejected that characterization of events, saying “that’s not what happened.”
From sometime in the middle of December, the president began to be told that I had some authority to reject or return votes back to the states. I had no such authority. I stand by the facts as they occur to me. It ebbed and flowed between different legal theories, but at the end of the day, I know we did our duty. I know we kept our oath. But I truly do believe that, you know, no one who ever puts himself over the Constitution should ever be president of the United States.
Watch above via ABC.
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