PENCE, PANEL IN HIGH-STAKES DANCE
He has told aides he thinks panel has taken partisan turn
As the U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol rushes to gather evidence and conduct interviews, how far it will be able to go in holding former President Donald Trump accountable increasingly appears to hinge on one possible witness: former Vice President Mike Pence.
Since the committee was formed last summer, Pence’s lawyer and the panel have been talking informally about whether he would be willing to speak to investigators, people briefed on the discussions said. But as Pence began sorting through a complex calculation about his cooperation, he indicated to the committee that he was undecided, they said.
To some degree, the current situation reflects negotiating strategies by both sides, with the committee eager to suggest an air of inevitability about Pence answering its questions and his advisers looking for reasons to limit his political exposure from a move that would further complicate his ambitions to run for president in 2024.
But there also appears to be growing tension.
In recent weeks, Pence is said by people familiar with his thinking to have grown increasingly disillusioned with the idea of voluntary cooperation.
He has told aides that the committee has taken a sharp partisan turn by openly considering the potential for criminal referrals to the Justice Department about Trump and others. Such referrals, in Pence’s view, appear designed to hurt Republican chances of winning control of Congress in November.
And Pence, they said, has grown annoyed that the committee is publicly signaling that it has secured a greater degree of cooperation from his top aides than it actually has, something he sees as part of a pattern of Democrats trying to turn his team against Trump.
For the committee, Pence’s testimony under oath would be an opportunity to establish in detail how Trump’s pressuring him to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis and helped inspire the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It could also be vital to the committee in deciding whether it has sufficient evidence to make a criminal referral of Trump to the Justice Department, as a number of its members have said they could consider doing. The potential charge floated by some members of the committee is violation of the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.
The combination of the pressure brought to bear on
Pence and on Trump’s repeated public exhortations about his vice president — “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” he told supporters on the Ellipse just before they marched to the Capitol — could help the committee build a well-documented narrative linking Trump to the temporary halting of the vote certification through rioters focused, at his urging, on Pence.
A criminal referral from the committee would carry little legal weight but could increase public pressure on the Justice Department. The department has given little indication of whether it is seriously considering building a case against Trump.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said last week that federal prosecutors remained “committed to holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”
But he did not mention Trump or indicate whether the department considered obstruction of Congress a charge that would fit the circumstances.
There are nonetheless some early indications that federal prosecutors working on charging the Capitol rioters are looking carefully at Trump’s pressure on Pence — and his efforts to rally his supporters to keep up that pressure even after Pence decided that he would not block certification of the Electoral College results.
In plea negotiations, federal prosecutors recently began asking defense lawyers for some of those charged in Jan. 6 cases whether their clients would admit in sworn statements that they stormed the Capitol believing that Trump wanted them to stop Pence from certifying the election.
In theory, such statements could help connect the violence at the Capitol directly to Trump’s demands that Pence help him stave off his defeat.