Former Vice President Mike Pence said Sunday that he was “not yet convinced” that former President Donald Trump's actions on the day of, and in the lead up to, the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol were criminal.
Trump said last week federal prosecutors alerted him he was the target of a grand jury investigation into the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“I've said many times that the President's words were reckless that day. I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence said on CNN’s “State of the Union" on Sunday. “While his words were reckless, based on what I know, I'm not yet convinced that they were criminal.”
“I really do hope it doesn't come to that,” Pence added.
As he continues his longshot pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination, Pence has toed the line of being critical of the actions of his former boss -- the race’s frontrunner -- after the 2020 election while continuing to defend Trump from what he called “unequal treatment” by the Department of Justice and other investigations into the former president’s conduct.
Pence, who Trump unsuccessfully pressured to use his ceremonial role in the counting of electoral college votes to delay their certification, said he “did my duty that day, under the Constitution” and that Trump was “wrong.” But he stopped short of saying he believed Trump should be criminally prosecuted, instead transitioning to discussing the congressional investigations into President Joe Biden and his family as well as his campaign pledge to gut Department of Justice leadership.
“As I traveled around New Hampshire I heard again and again from people about a deep concern about unequal treatment of the law,” Pence said. “That's why I said to people, if I'm elected president of the United States, we're not just going to have a new attorney general, we're going to clean house among all the senior leadership at the Justice Department and we're going to appoint men and women of integrity.”
On the same CNN show on Sunday, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., responded to Pence’s resistance to applying criminality to Trump’s actions with disappointment.
“I'm afraid when I heard the vice president say earlier, as much as I admire him and he was a hero that day, my sense was the president is not above the law,” Pelosi said. “We saw what happened. It was very clear.”
On Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump supporters marched to the Capitol on Trump’s urging and forced their way in, some chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Pence’s wife and daughter were with him that day and had to be evacuated from the Senate chamber and hidden from the rioters.
In March, Pence said Trump “endangered my family” that day.
But on Sunday, Pence was less severe in his recollection of that day, calling his old boss “reckless” and saying that “history will hold him accountable,” while arguing that he didn’t believe Trump had criminal intent and that he was “absolutely convinced” Republican voters will nominate someone besides Trump for president in 2024.
Trump currently leads most national polls by around 30 percentage points with Pence sitting in fourth place around 7%, according to a polling average from FiveThirtyEight.
“What his intentions were, and as you know, criminal charges have everything to do with intent, what the president's state of mind was, I don't honestly know what his intention was that day as he spoke to that crowd, as he tweeted during the riot itself,” Pence said. “I believe that Republican primary voters know that we need new leadership in this party. I know that some of the pundits and the pollsters think it's different out there.”
Last week, after he said he received a target letter from the federal criminal investigation run by special counsel Jack Smith, Trump intimated on an Iowa radio show host that the response from his supporters “would be very dangerous” if he was imprisoned.
“I think it’s a very dangerous thing to even talk about, because we do have a tremendously passionate group of voters, much more passion than they had in 2020 and much more passion than they had in 2016,” Trump said.
On Sunday, Pence said the rhetoric didn’t bother him.
“It doesn't worry me because I have more confidence in the American people and in the people in our movement,” Pence said. “I hear my former running mate’s frustration in his voice but I'm sure the American people will respond in our movement in a way that will express, as they have every right to under the First Amendment, to express concerns they have about what they perceive to be unequal treatment of the law, but I'm not concerned about it beyond that.”
As for those who chanted “hang Mike Pence,” the former vice president was quick to defend Trump supporters, saying the violence on Jan. 6 has been used as a “broad brush to describe everyone in our movement.”
“The people who rallied behind our cause in 2016 and 2020 are the most God-fearing, law-abiding, patriotic people in this country, and I just won't stand for those kinds of generalizations because they have no basis in fact,” Pence said.
More than 1,000 people in nearly every state have been charged with crimes connected to the attack so far, the Justice Department said earlier this month.