Mike Pence did a good thing on January 6, 2021, when he refused to bow to Donald Trump’s demands to block the certification of the 2020 election. Unfortunately for the country, that’s where the then vice president’s good deeds started and ended. For one thing, in the run-up to that day, Pence tried his damnedest to figure out a way to help Trump steal a second term. For another, in the years since, the ex-VP has shamelessly done everything in his power to ensure his former boss escapes any actual responsibility for inciting a violent insurrection, from stonewalling the January 6 committee to defying a subpoena from the special counsel investigating Trump. Meanwhile, Pence still can’t even bring himself to say he won’t vote for the guy who inspired the, “hang Mike Pence” chants on January 6, and who just this month declared that that insurrection? Was all Pence’s fault.
As you might imagine, all of this has been pretty frustrating for a lot of people—not least of all the federal judge who said Tuesday that Pence’s attempts to dodge the subpoena to appear before the grand jury probing Trump are crap, and that he must show up.
CNN and other outlets report that US District Court judge James Boasberg “has decided that…Pence must testify to a grand jury about conversations he had with Donald Trump leading up to January 6, 2021,” according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. (The ruling is currently under seal.) As CNN notes, the ruling represents a “major win” for Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Merrick Garland last year to oversee both the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and his handling of classified documents. Among other dubious legal arguments, Pence had claimed that his chats with Trump are protected by executive privilege, which prevents him from providing testimony about them. Last month, J. Michael Luttig—a former federal appeals court judge, conservative, and the person whose counsel Pence listened to concerning certifying the 2020 results—said in an op-ed that that was, legally speaking, horseshit, writing: “We can expect the federal courts to make short shrift of this ‘Hail Mary’ claim, and Mr. Pence doesn’t have a chance in the world of winning his case in any federal court and avoiding testifying before the grand jury…. The only question now is not whether he will have to testify before the grand jury, but how soon.”
Pence still has the opportunity to appeal the decision and presumably will. In other less-than-great news, Boasberg ruled, per CNN, that the former VP “can still decline to answer questions related to his actions on January 6 itself, when he was serving as president of the Senate for the certification of the 2020 presidential election,” according to a source.
Still, requiring Trump’s ex-number two to testify about the conversations they had leading up to the attack on the Capitol is clearly a big deal, given that the 45th president spent weeks trying to convince Pence to block Joe Biden’s win:
In related news, last month, The New York Times reported that both Ivanka and Jared Kushner had been subpoenaed to testify before Smith’s grand jury. While it’s not clear if the former first daughter and son-in-law will put up a similar fight as the ex-VP, it is clear that Ivanka’s testimony would be of particular interest, given that she reportedly attended the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the attack in the reported hopes of keeping “her father from going too far.”