The 2020 election is being investigated for possible fraud by Donald Trump and his friends, who are under investigation by the special counsel.
According to reports on Thursday, special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence in an investigation into possible election rigging by former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
A court battle over executive privilege is certain to ensue as a result of this development, a topic that attorneys for Mr. Trump have already cited to prevent or delay the testimony of former government officials in different inquiries over the last several years.
There was no obvious way to tell when Mr. Smith issued the subpoena to Mr. Pence or what information the feds were looking for. Last year, as part of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to invalidate the 2020 election results, former chief of staff Marc Short and senior lawyer Greg Jacob for Vice President Pence testified before a federal grand jury.
In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland authorized Mr. Smith to investigate efforts to overturn election results and the handling of secret information found at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. Over the year, this investigation has progressed to the point where, in August, Trump’s Florida property was searched.
Vice President Pence declined an invitation to testify before a congressional committee investigating the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. According to those acquainted with the former vice president’s thoughts, he distinguishes the Justice Department probe from the House inquiry, which he views as biased.
After his legal team reported finding a limited number of classified papers in the home and turning them over to authorities, the Justice Department issued a subpoena to Mr. Pence, prompting the search of his Indiana residence for such materials in the following days. According to those in the know, the search by the Justice Department is scheduled to begin in the coming days.
No immediate information was available on whether Mr. Smith’s team would also want to interrogate Mr. Pence in connection with the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive material.
Jack Smith is the special counsel in charge of the Justice Department’s investigations into the mishandling of confidential papers at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and the attempts to change the results of the 2020 election.
While Mr. Pence declined to testify before the House Committee on January 6, the panel’s public hearings exposed Mr. Trump’s efforts to urge his vice president to block the certification of President Biden’s victory. Trump urged Pence to go against tradition on certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021, and instead to adopt the conservative lawyer John Eastman’s legal theory that Pence could reject votes from certain states unilaterally or suspend vote counting to turn the matter back to the states.
A former federal judge and conservative lawyer, J. Michael Luttig, who counseled Mr. Pence in the days leading up to January 6, 2021, spoke at one of the committee’s public sessions. That idea of Mr. Eastman’s has no validity in the Constitution or the laws of the United States, and Luttig called the endeavor “constitutional mischief.”
Mr. Trump is the sole Republican contender for president in the 2024 election. Mr. Pence may challenge the current Republican frontrunner.
It is widely anticipated that President Biden would run for reelection despite being the subject of a separate special counsel investigation into secret materials discovered at his Delaware home and the Penn Biden Center.
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