Former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday offered his most forceful rebuke of Donald Trump, saying that Trump is “wrong” that Pence had the legal authority to change the results of the 2020 election and that the Republican Party must accept the outcome and look toward the future.
Speaking to a gathering of conservatives near Orlando, Florida, the former vice president said he understands “the disappointment so many feel about the last election” but repudiated Trump’s false claims that Pence could reject Electoral College results and alter the outcome last year.
“President Trump is wrong,” said Pence, in his remarks before the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
The comments marked the strongest rejection of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election by his former vice president. Pence refused to give in to Trump’s pressure campaign Jan. 6 to change the results and has remained relatively quiet about that decision since leaving office. He had largely declined to directly attack Trump or assign him any blame for inciting the deadly Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol. In public appearances last year, Pence defended his role in resisting Trump but did not go further than saying the two men will never “see eye to eye about that day.”
But tensions have been rising in recent days between the two men. As Pence positions himself for a possible presidential bid in 2024, Trump has pushed more intensely a false narrative aimed at blaming his former vice president for failing to stop President Joe Biden from taking office.
Pence cast his opposition Friday as larger than the immediate political moment, implying that the false claims pushed by Trump and his followers threatened to undermine American democracy.
“The truth is there’s more at stake than our party or our political fortunes,” he said. “If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections — we’ll lose our country.”
In a speech that largely focused on attacking the policies and record of the Biden administration, Pence disavowed several of the falsehoods being pushed by Trump and his base about the election. He described Jan. 6 as a “dark day” in Washington, breaking with the right wing of his party that has attempted to rewrite history by describing the siege as a peaceful rally and by calling the rioters “political prisoners.” And he urged Trump and his party to accept the results of the last election and “focus on the future.”
Whatever the future holds, I know we did our duty that day,” Pence said. “I believe the time has come to focus on the future.”
His comments came just hours after the Republican Party voted to censure two Republican lawmakers for taking part in the House investigation of the Jan. 6 attack. The lawmakers, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, were censured for participating in what the party’s resolution described as the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
Legal scholars and officials from both parties say the vice president does not have the power to overturn elections. Pence agrees with that interpretation of the law: In a letter to Congress sent the morning of the Capitol attack, Pence rejected the president’s claims, writing that the Constitution “constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”
On Sunday, Trump falsely claimed that Pence could have “overturned the election” in a statement denouncing a bipartisan push to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The former president and his allies misinterpreted that century-old law in their failed bid to persuade Pence to throw out legitimate election results. And Tuesday, Trump said the congressional committee investigating the role of his administration in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol should instead examine “why Mike Pence did not send back the votes for recertification or approval.”
Trump’s attempts to influence his vice president have become a focus of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, with some members seeing the participation of Pence’s team as vital to deciding whether it has sufficient evidence to make a criminal referral of Trump to the Justice Department. Two of Pence’s aides testified privately before the committee this week, and Pence’s lawyer and the panel have been talking informally about whether the former vice president would be willing to speak to investigators.
The Justice Department has also been examining the ways in which Trump’s attacks on Pence influenced the mob Jan. 6. In recent plea negotiations in some Jan. 6 cases, prosecutors have asked defense lawyers 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.
