Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion to compel former Vice President Mike Pence to testify.
Pence resisted the grand jury subpoena for his testimony about Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election.
Earlier this month it was reported that the special counsel overseeing the investigations into Trump has subpoenaed Mike Pence.
According to Politico, rather than assert executive privilege, Pence will argue that as president of the Senate, he was acting as a member of the legislative branch on January 6 and is therefore protected by the DOJ’s demands.
Pence previously told reporters he will take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
“On the day of January 6, I was acting as president of the Senate, presiding over a joint session described in the Constitution itself. So, I believe that that Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution actually prohibits the executive branch from compelling me to appear in a court, as the Constitution says, or in any other place,” Pence told reporters in Iowa last week.
“We’ll stand on that principle and we’ll take that case as far as it needs to go, if it needs be to the Supreme Court of the United States,” he said.
The Special Counsel this week asked a judge to compel Mike Pence’s testimony.
CBS News reported:
Federal prosecutors have asked the chief judge in Washington, D.C.’s federal court to compel former Vice President Mike Pence to comply with a grand jury subpoena and testify as a witness in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, three people familiar with the investigation told CBS News.
The motion to compel Pence’s testimony — filed in secret to Chief Judge Beryl Howell in recent days — came after lawyers for former President Donald Trump asserted executive privilege in response to Pence’s subpoena, the people said.
That assertion of executive privilege on Pence’s subpoena, the people added, is in line with how Trump’s team has responded to related subpoenas over the past year, with Trump’s attorneys often arguing that private conversations or interactions with a president should remain confidential.
The latest filing also comes after Pence has signaled he would oppose a subpoena from Smith’s office.
Pence and his lawyers have also been preparing to invoke the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause as a means of protecting him from the investigation. That clause protects members of Congress from being questioned about their legislative actions by other branches of the federal government.
Jack Smith is moving full steam ahead with his probes into whether Trump committed crimes.
The special counsel investigation was supposed to focus on whether Trump broke the law when he took White House records to Mar-a-Lago and the other part of the probe is related to January 6.
However, Jack Smith has now expanded his investigation and is looking into Trump’s efforts to fight the massive 2020 election fraud operation in key swing states.