A Brief Analysis of a Phone Call Pence had with the Vice President after the Biden Electoral Insurrection, and How to Obtain It
Prosecutors appear to want the former vice president to flesh out testimony of some of his senior aides and White House officials about Trump’s pressure on him to block the certification of Biden’s 2020 victory. Pence insists he has nothing to hide. His lawyers argued that he should not be allowed to testify because he is the president of the Senate. The doctrine is supposed to protect the separation of powers, and Pence effectively argued that it barred the executive – including the Justice Department – from forcing him to speak before the grand jury about his congressional duty.
I told the President there wereIrregularities and Fraud, according to an account written by the Vice President. “It’s just a question of who decides, and under the law that is Congress.”
It’s unusual that the judge in Washington, DC, ruled that the vice president’s authority and separation of powers were at odds with the rules of the grand jury. Pence still has the ability to appeal.
The requirements of my testimony that are going forward are a subject of review right now, and I will tell you more in the days to come.
In the days after the insurrection, there was interest in the conversations Trump and Pence had. Though Pence declined to testify before the House January 6 committee that investigated the insurrection, people in Trump’s orbit told the committee about a heated phone call he had with Pence the day of the attack in which he lobbed insults at his vice president.
A former special assistant to Trump told the committee that he remembered Trump calling Pence a “wimp.” Luna said he recalled something to the effect of Trump saying, “I made the wrong decision four or five years ago.”
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.”
The former vice president also said in the book that he asked his general counsel for a briefing on the procedures of the Electoral Count Act after Trump in a December 5 phone call “mentioned challenging the election results in the House of Representatives for the first time.”
Days after news broke of the subpoena, Pence and his advisers indicated that the former vice president would challenge the subpoena under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which shields lawmakers from certain law enforcement actions connected to their legislative duties.
Pence’s claims, as he has described them publicly, are seen as novel. His argument drew criticism from a range of legal scholars, including the former Judge who argued that Pence should certify the electoral results.
His statement led to a flurry of speculation on the state of the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump’s alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
Two court sources told CNN that the grand jury won’t consider the case this week, despite no action being taken by the district attorney’s office. The grand jury will not meet Wednesday and will be hearing an unrelated case on Thursday, the sources said. The grand jury typically does not meet on Fridays.
No. After he lost the election, Donald Trump called on his supporters to protest and post on his social media that he would be arrested.
He’s continued to rail against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the other prosecutors investigating him in Washington, DC, and Georgia. He warned last week that the arrest would result in potential death and destruction, as well as catastrophic for our country.
“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.
On Monday afternoon, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker was whisked into and out of the Manhattan courthouse building. 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 district attorney’s office could have felt they had to rebut the testimony of Costello, who claimed Cohen had made the payment himself.
The Times of Trump’s First Indictment: Confronting Corcoran and Smith in New York with the FBI and Mar-a-Lago
If Trump is indicted, the charges are expected to be filed under seal. Trump will travel to New York to surrender and listen to the charges, after he was notified by his attorneys.
There have been security preparations underway for several weeks now among multiple law enforcement agencies about how security for a potential Trump indictment would be handled in Manhattan.
Bragg has said that he will let the public know whether or not Trump is charged when the investigation is over.
It is not possible to know what is going on inside the grand jury. But Corcoran was told by the court he could no longer withhold information about communications he had with Trump leading up to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last year. He was told to turn over his attorney notes. It’s a perfect situation to know how Trump was handling the government’s attempts to get documents back, and if he was trying to obstruct the government.
The prosecutor in Fulton County, Georgia, said at the end of January that charging decisions were imminent in an investigation into his efforts to overturn Biden’s victory in the crucial swing state. CNN reports that prosecutors are considering bringing racketeering and conspiracy charges.
Each development could mean the end of protection from the former president, who has not been charged in any of the cases. Both probes being pursued by Smith are succeeding in overcoming Trump’s strategy of stalling accountability with spurious litigation and questionable claims of executive and attorney client privilege that take time to litigate. And while any charges over January 6 could be complex and might require prosecutors to use rarely tested concepts, a potential obstruction charge in the documents case could be far easier to bring.
“It is interesting to me that there is this scrum over the New York case, but I really do believe that in particular, the Mar-a-Lago case, the potential obstruction of justice case, puts (Trump) in the greatest jeopardy right now,” said former federal Judge John Jones III, who is now president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
If Trump is charged and indicted he would be the first former president to ever be indicted, but his re-presidential bid raises the prospect of an extraordinary political uproar. Trump is already fanning the flames of a situation that would be guaranteed to exacerbate the country’s extreme political polarization. During his campaign rally in Texas last weekend, the ex-president made up a story about how the Biden administration was trying to take the justice system out of his hands.
But he could also blur the legal technicalities by arguing that he stood up to the Biden administration’s Justice Department – a potentially useful weapon in a GOP presidential debate. He could have expanded the scope of the office of the vice president, clarifying and establishing new interpretations of the Speech or Debate Clause. The latter question needs to be considered definitive by the eventual appeals court or Supreme Court consideration of Speech or Debate Clause cases.