Former President Donald Trump faulted his vice president, Mike Pence, for refusing to play ball and try to overturn the results of the 2020 election in their favor.
The admission came Sunday in a statement released by his Save America PAC, commenting on a bipartisan effort in the Senate to update the 1887 law that outlines the vice president’s role in overseeing Congress certifying the election results. Trump singled out Sen. Susan Collins, a centrist Republican from Maine, who, according to Politico, is spearheading the group and on Sunday morning said she wouldn’t rule out supporting Trump in 2024 if he runs for the White House again but also claimed it was “not likely” in the expectation that there would be other “qualified” candidates.
“If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had ‘absolutely no right’ to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election? Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away,” Trump argued.
“Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” he added with emphasis.
Pence resisted intense pressure from Trump and his allies to stall the Jan. 6, 2021, Electoral College vote count and even sent a letter to Congress saying that he did not have the power to reject Electoral College votes. Trump hasn’t let his former vice president forget it. In December, Trump said Pence is a “good man” who made a “big mistake.”
Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro has opened up about working with Steve Bannon to implement what he dubs the “Green Bay Sweep.” The plan was to enlist members of Congress and put pressure on Pence to stall the Jan. 6 certification and send electoral votes back to several battleground states where GOP-led legislatures could try to overturn the results over concerns about fraud and irregularities. Navarro claims the rioters who swarmed the Capitol, disrupting the counting of electoral votes, messed up the plan.
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On Twitter, George Conway, a vocal Trump critic who is a lawyer and is the husband of Trump’s former senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, shot back with an “answer” to the 45th president’s statement Sunday, saying such a bid to overturn the results was never a possibility and the effort to change what is in the books is meant to clarify it.
“The Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 already make it entirely clear that the Vice President merely opens the envelopes. But sometimes we want to make laws even clearer so that even semiliterate psychopaths have a chance at understanding them,” Conway said.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has long covered Trump, said on Twitter that “Pence is speaking the night before Trump in NOLA at the Rnc.” She also tweeted, “Trump saying the quiet part out loud here about overturning an election,” and, “First the claim was that Pence could change the outcome, then it became that it was just about sending the election ‘back to the states.’ Now it’s back to overturning it again.”
Election officials and the courts have roundly rejected claims of widespread fraud, and now efforts to disrupt the process, as well as the Capitol riot, are under investigation, including by a select committee in the House. Both the Justice Department and the Jan. 6 panel are looking into slates of alternate electors for Trump in several states won by President Joe Biden.
“’He could have overturned the election.’ This is an admission, and a massively un-American statement. It is time for every Republican leader to pick a side… Trump or the Constitution, there is no middle on defending our nation anymore,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republican members of the Jan. 6 committee, said in a tweet Sunday.
Trump has not committed to a 2024 run for office, but he made headlines Saturday evening during a rally in Texas when he hinted at pardons for people arrested and charged in connection to the Capitol riot.
“We will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” Trump said. “We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly. This hasn’t happened to all of the other atrocities that took place recently. Nothing like this has happened. What that ‘unselect’ committee is doing and what the people are doing that are running those prisons, it’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace. We will treat them fairly, and we will take care of the people of this country. All of the people of this country.”
Meanwhile, Democrats, including Biden, have begun to warn that the 2022 midterm elections and beyond are in jeopardy, pointing to red states making reforms to their election protocols that Republicans argue are needed for election integrity. Biden and Democrats in Congress have been pushing for a pair of partisan election overhaul measures that they argue will alleviate efforts to make it harder for people to vote, minorities in particular, but they are opposed by Republicans resistant to federal laws that govern how states and localities run their elections. The legislation failed to take off due to sufficient opposition to changing filibuster rules in the Senate.
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Pence told Fox News last week that Jan. 6, 2021, was “a tragic day in the life of the nation” and defended his actions.
“I know I did my duty under the constitution of the United States,” Pence said. “But the president and I sat down in the days that followed that. We spoke about it, talked through it. We parted amicably.”
