Ari Melber outlines why Mike Pence's testimony matters more than anyone else's in Jan. 6 probe
At the top of his show, less than an hour after news broke that former Vice President Mike Pence was seen entering and leaving the grand jury Thursday, Ari Melber had a list of why he's such a major witness.
There are low-level staffers, Secret Service agents, and even Trump's former chief-of-staff, who have appeared before the grand jury, but no one is as big as Pence, he explained. No one can sink Trump more than Pence can.
His first example is that there is evidence that showed Pence had first-hand information very few others had.
"There's a lot of talk and hyperbole, but I'm saying that as a reported piece of information, we have from covering all this, Mike Pence, from the documents and from the transcripts that the Jan. 6th provided, and from a lot of other indications that we have, has access to information that few or no other people have. It's the kind of information that the DOJ wants because it could inform quite decisively whether other people are indicted or not in this coup probe."
Outside of that one major thing, Melber had his list of things Pence knows. First is what were "Trump's demands to carry out a coup" before the Jan. 6th. What Melber called "the early stuff."
Second, "Trump's effort to steal the election at the state level." One thing that was caught on tape in calls to Georgia officials was Trump's demand for the Republicans there to "find" him 11,780 votes, which was the necessary number to win the state.
The third question, "what does Pence know about Donald Trump pushing to execute on that [Peter] Navarro - [John] Eastman plan to try to jam Congress with fraudulent elector slates and other basically false, misleading, or potentially illegal government submissions."
Those would then be used for Melber's fourth point: "What does Pence know about whether Trump actually issued unlawful orders for Pence to claim powers he did not have to stage a coup and overturn the election on Jan. 6?"
His bullet point under "number four" is there's a difference between a president musing about something or asking someone something. A president all the time could ask the Pentagon or lawyers, can we do this? Could we do that should we do this? That's a decision-making process. Nothing criminal about that. That's different from knowing something is illegal and issuing an unlawful order."
Melber explained that Pence knows better than anyone in the White House whether Trump was just "musing" or he was pushing unethical moves.
It's unknown what special counsel Jack Smith asked Pence today, but those are some of the places he could begin.
The testimony comes just 24 hours after the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee got a request from Trump's lawyers to get the DOJ to dismiss the investigation into the documents stolen by Trump from the White House.
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