Ex-Vice President Mike Pence, a likely political rival to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, says his former boss’s “reckless words” during the Jan. 6 riots put his and his family’s lives in danger.
Pence — who has previously made no bones about how he believes Trump dangerously botched the 2021 government crisis — took his latest swipe at Trump before a crowd of about 600 journalists, officials and fellow pols at Saturday’s typically light-hearted annual Gridiron Club dinner in DC.
The ex-veep noted that he refused to be escorted away from the Capitol by the Secret Service as a mob of pro-Trump supporters broke into the building that day in an effort to overturn the November general election.
”I was not afraid, but I was angry,” Pence said.
“President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election,” the pol said, referring to the then-commander-in-chief’s push to get him to help rewrite the election results in the 2020 race, which Trump lost to Joe Biden.
“And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day,” Pence said.
“And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable,” he added.
Pence said he balked when Secret Service agents whisked him off the Senate floor and told him that he would have to leave the Capitol, even as some in the mob were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
“But I was determined to stay. I believed that law enforcement would soon have the situation in hand, never imagining what would unfurl, would occur,” Pence said.
“But it was there, in that small office just off the Senate chamber, there was a small television set, and we watched what was unfolding outside — the mayhem and the rioting. You could hear it echoing outside and soon thereafter in the hallways,” Pence said.
Pence was presiding over the certification of the electoral vote in the 2020 general election as Senate president Jan. 6 when then-president Trump pressured him to contest the results. Pence refused.
At the Gridiron dinner, Pence said the American public deserves more answers about that day.
“The American people have a right to know what took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” he said, before praising the media for continuing to report on the riot.
Pence’s comments come days after he filed a motion asking a judge to block a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Trump’s role in the Capitol riot.
The former vice president argues that he is protected from testifying because he was acting in the capacity of an officer of Congress on Jan. 6 and is shielded by the “Speech and Debate Clause” that says lawmakers cannot be questioned or arrested for conducting their legislative work.
With Post wires