I am not a lawyer … and I don’t even play one on TV, but I have a hunch about a legal proceeding that I want to share.
It is that former Vice President Mike Pence’s testimony this week before a grand jury examining the 1/6 insurrection well might be the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s idiotic quest for the presidency in 2024.
Special counsel Jack Smith summoned Pence to testify before the panel; Pence initially fought it, then he and the Pence-Trump legal team were told that the ex-VP had to testify.
Today, he did. Prosecutors sworn him to tell the truth and they then worked him over behind closed doors.
They likely asked Pence: What did Trump say to you in advance of the 1/6 assault on the government and what did you say to him?
I suppose it is possible that Pence could invoke the Fifth Amendment, which protects him against self-incrimination. Except that he isn’t the subject of the probe; Pence is a low-risk witness, given that on that terrible day he stood his ground and stood on the Constitution, which required him to do his duty that day, which was to preside over congressional certification of the Electoral College results from the 2020 presidential election.
Oh, yes, that’s the election that Joe Biden won over Donald Trump.
Pence has told TV interviewers that Trump’s remarks that day were “reckless” and that they put “everyone in the Capitol that day” in dire danger. Indeed, traitors who stormed the Capitol threatened to assassinate Pence and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
What did Trump do to stop it? Not a damn thing!
That’s the kind of testimony that the former vice president of the United States can deliver to the special counsel and the grand jury that will determine whether to indict the former president of the United States.
My non-lawyerly gut tells me the special counsel’s hammer is about to hit home … as it must.