The questions the special counsel wants to ask Mike Pence
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has long resisted any effort to give information to investigators about what happened on and during the leadup to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, appears ready to acknowledge he has no choice but to speak to special counsel Jack Smith.
Speaking to MSNBC's Alex Wagner on Thursday, former Georgia-based U.S. Attorney Michael Moore outlined what that could look like — and what sorts of questions Smith might want answered by the former vice president.
"Michael, is there a world in which there's a narrowly subscribe set of conversations that Pence had in the context of him being a President of the Senate that are off limits, but everything else, including conversations that happened in the Oval Office, that have nothing to do with his ministerial role, those aren't off limits?" asked Wagner.
"In other words, is there some version of this resolution where he gets the have his cake on the Speech and Debate Clause, and that's a narrow set of conversations, but the important conversations, the most relevant conversations are very much on the table, as far as testimony with the grand jury?"
"There might be a way to split the baby in the circumstance," said Moore. "You might find that there's some conversations that are protected and off limits from public questioning. I'm not going to say they necessarily follow under the Constitution. But the judge may say, look, I'm not gonna make you go into this, mister prosecutor, but I am gonna let you talk about that."
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"Tell me about what happened, tell me about what you saw, tell me about what you observed, tell me about what was said to you," said Moore, as examples of what Smith could ask Pence. "Tell me about those types of things at the time that are more, I guess, contemporary a type of observation, as opposed to something that maybe he talked about with a colleague that was in the Senate at the time that he may have been standing in the chamber or something. So there may be a way to do that, and I could see how that could happen. But again, the special counsel's looking for this information about what did Trump know? What were you told to do? What did you see at the time? Did you get a note, did somebody send you something? So this will really get at the heart of what was going on down at the other end of Washington, away from the Capitol."
Watch the segment below or at this link.
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