Trump attorney and Pence clash

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s defense attorney says the former president never asked Mike Pence to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 election, but only wanted the former vice president to “pause” the certification of votes to allow states to investigate his claims of election fraud. Those baseless claims had already been rejected by numerous courts.

Speaking on several Sunday morning news shows, Trump attorney John Lauro said Trump was within his First Amendment rights when he petitioned Pence to delay the certification on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The ultimate ask of Vice President Pence was to pause the counts and allow the states to weigh in,” Lauro said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He added that Trump was convinced there were irregularities in the election that needed to be investigated by state authorities before the election could be certified.

Pence, who like Trump is seeking the Republican nomination for president in 2024, flatly rejected that account during an interview Sunday, saying Trump seemed “convinced” as early as December that Pence had the right to reject or return votes and that on Jan. 5, Trump’s attorneys told him, “We want you to reject votes outright.”

“They were asking me to overturn the election. I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Pence’s role in certifying Joe Biden’s win over Trump in the 2020 election makes him a central figure in the prosecution against Trump on charges that he sought to overturn the will of the voters and remain in office even after the courts had roundly rejected his claims of electoral fraud. Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general also had said there were was no credible evidence that the election was tainted.

Last week’s indictment chronicles how Trump and his allies, in what special counsel Jack Smith described as an attack on a “bedrock function of the U.S. government,” repeatedly lied about the results in the two months after he lost the election and pressured Pence and state election officials to take action to help him cling to power. Those efforts culminated in a riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to stop the certification.