It was a dumb move on Mike Pence’s part to object in the first place to Jack Smith’s subpoena. It was thought at the time that maybe Pence was looking to run out the clock, but that made no sense since a court swiftly ruled that Lindsey Graham had to testify, under similar circumstances. In all events, it’s a done deal now and Pence will have to testify before the January 6 grand jury. New York Times:
A federal judge has ordered former Vice President Mike Pence to appear in front of a grand jury investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, sweeping aside two separate legal efforts by Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump to limit his testimony, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The rulings on Monday, by Judge James E. Boasberg in Federal District Court in Washington, were the latest setback to bids by Mr. Trump’s legal team to pare back the scope of the questions that prosecutors can ask witnesses close to him in two grand jury investigations.
This month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Boasberg’s predecessor as chief judge for the court, Beryl A. Howell, to limit Mr. Pence’s testimony by claiming that certain issues were off limits because of executive privilege, which protects communications between the president and some members of his administration.
That theory just fell on its butt resoundingly. What Jack Smith wants to know about are what Pence and Trump discussed before and during the vote count. Smith is within his rights to ask that.
It will be interesting to see what they said and how it sounded. Was Pence his ever-obsequious self, deferring to Trump, even as Trump was signing off on having him lynched? This is interesting in any event, but especially since Pence is intending to run for president in 2024. We’ll have a chance now to see how Pence behaved under pressure on January 6 and that should give everybody some insight as to what kind of a president he would make.
I don’t think Pence is going to come out of this smelling like a rose. My sense of it is that his testimony will reveal that he could have, and certainly should have, persuaded Trump that what he was doing was futile. I doubt if Pence did that. But we’re not going to have to wonder what went on for too much longer, evidently.
It will be interesting to see what effect, if any, Pence’s testimony has on the 2024 GOP primary process. Maybe Ron DeSantis just got a big boost. Say what you will about DeSantis, at least he wasn’t part of January 6. Pence was.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. ha. Think the fly will come?
Does anyone honestly believe this disingenuous, bad-faith acting, cynical fake is going to answer ANYTHING honestly? “I can’t recall”. “I don’t remember”. “Fifth”. Someone needs to take these bad faith actors out and put the fear of the God they supposedly believe in and follow in them.
Most likely, Smith already knows the gist of what was discussed. There were other witnesses who heard the conversation. If Pence tries to obfuscate, he’ll get nailed. If he tells the whole truth, his political career within the GOP is over.
They won’t ask stuff where they don’t already have some idea of the real answer.
Two thoughts came as I was reading the article and preceding comments, and I’m relating them in reverse order for effect:
Second, Karen mentioned that QTip’s political career could be over if he tells the federal grand jury the truth about J6, but it has been pointed out in other Politizoom posts that the piss-poor performance of his as Indiana’s governor had pretty well finished that off until TFG gave it new life.
My first reaction was to Ursula’s comment that Pence was unlikely to come out of this smelling like a rose. To me, the only result is he’ll come out SMELLING (that meets my quota for lame joke of the day).