A federal judge ordered former Vice President Mike Pence to testify before a grand jury investigating Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the matter.
(Bloomberg) — A federal judge ordered former Vice President Mike Pence to testify before a grand jury investigating Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office subpoenaed Pence earlier this year. Pence has said publicly that it was wrong for the former president to pressure him to reject Electoral College votes from key states when he presided over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. But he vowed last month to fight the demand from federal prosecutorsto the US Supreme Court if necessary.
The order for Pence to testify came from US District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg, according to the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss information that’s not public. The ruling was earlier reported by CNN.
Boasberg did uphold limited parts of the legislative privilege that Pence had argued for, but rejected the executive privilege claim pressed by Trump’s attorneys, according to ABC.
Pence had raised a novel challenge to the subpoena, arguing it was wrong for the executive branch to compel him to testify when he was acting as a legislative official in his capacity as the president of the Senate during Congress’s certification of the election on Jan. 6, 2021.
“That runs against literally hundreds of years of not only American law, but common law,” Pence told reporters. “We’ve got to stand for that principle because it’s a separation of powers. And that’s why we’re prepared to take this fight into the court and, if needs be, take it to the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Pence’s attorney Emmet Flood appeared at the federal courthouse in Washington last week and went before Boasberg, who handles the court’s secret grand jury proceedings. Trump’s attorneys were also in attendance.
A spokesperson for Pence and for Smith’s office declined to comment.
A Trump spokesperson released a statement accusing the Justice Department of “continuously stepping far outside the standard norms in attempting to destroy the long accepted, long held, Constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege.”
–With assistance from Mark Niquette.
(Updated with Trump spokesman in last paragraph.)
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