Jan. 6 House panel chair wants Mike Pence to speak voluntarily with committee
The chairman of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot wants former Vice President Mike Pence to speak with the panel voluntarily.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said that while the committee has not formally requested Pence to appear, he hoped the former veep “would do the right thing and come forward and voluntarily talk to the committee.”
“His life was at risk,” Thompson told CNN on Tuesday. “There were people who had gallows erected on the lawn of the Capitol ostensibly to hang the vice president. There were people on them threatening the life of the vice president. The vice president could not leave the Capitol of the United States because of the riot.”
Thompson added that he believes Pence could provide information about what former President Donald Trump was doing on the day of the upheaval and whether he made any attempts to stop the violence.
“We’d like to know what his security detail told him was going on,” said the lawmaker, who also said that Pence could offer insight about what Trump White House staffers told him about not certifying the Electoral College vote that day and his movements inside the Capitol as Trump supporters stormed the facility.
The Jan. 6 committee has requested or issued subpoenas to many key members of the former administration, including Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short.
Many of those subpoenaed have either cited their Fifth Amendment rights in defying the summonses or challenged the legality of the subpoenas in court.
Steve Bannon, a Trump ally and former White House staffer, was indicted by a federal grand jury in November for refusing to appear before the panel.
Last month, the House voted to hold Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, in contempt after he blew off a deposition.
Pence said in an interview with Fox News last month that he would have to “evaluate” any requests to cooperate.
“They’ve begun an investigation, and I can tell you that going forward, we’ll do our part to make sure the American people understand the issues on that day, which for me ultimately come down to what the Constitution required,” Pence said at the time.
“From the founding of this nation, our founders believed that elections should be governed at the state level and that the only role the Congress would have would be to open and count the electoral votes,” he continued.
Pence, acting in his role as Senate president, refused to decertify the 2020 election results during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, saying he did not have the constitutional authority to do so.
After rioters forced the evacuation of the House and Senate chambers for several hours, lawmakers convened early the next morning and completed the certification of the vote.
“On Jan. 6, I said that I believed there were irregularities about which I was concerned, and I wanted them to have a fair hearing before the Congress, but from the founding of this nation forward, it’s been well established that elections are to be governed at the state level and that the only role that Congress has is to open and count the electoral votes that are submitted by states across the country,” Pence said in a December interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“No more, no less than that.”
