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Former Vice President Mike Pence may have committed a felony after he "concealed" evidence of Donald Trump's alleged crimes in the wake of the 2020 election, according to a former federal prosecutor.
Glenn Kirschner, an attorney and legal analyst for NBC and MSNBC, was discussing details from Pence's new book So Help Me God, extracts of which were recently published in The Wall Street Journal.
In the book, Pence described how Trump made frequent attempts to try and pressure him to stop the 2020 election results from being certified in Congress on January 6, 2021, during his purely ceremonial role of president officer of the Senate.
Pence described on January 1, 2021, he informed Trump that he didn't have the constitutional power to stop the votes from being certified, to which Trump replied: "You're too honest."
The following day, Pence said Trump "pressed me again" to reject electoral votes, quoting the former president as saying: "You can be a historic figure, but if you wimp out, you're just another somebody."
Pence also described how Trump worked with lawyer John Eastman to try and pressure him to block the congressional certification of the election, even though Eastman knew it may be illegal to do so.
Pence said that Trump called the then-vice president on the morning of January 6 to tell Pence he'd be remembered as a "wimp," if he followed through with plans to start the congressional ceremony, as he was supposed to do.
"If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago," Trump said, according to Pence.
While discussing The New York Times' reporting of the passages on his YouTube channel, Kirschner said he wants to "add a little bit of fiction" to what Pence should have then written in his memoirs.
"The next paragraph should probably read something like: 'So then I, the Vice President of the United States, promptly reported Donald Trump's crimes to the appropriate law enforcement authority. Thereafter, I, Mike Pence, knew I would have to volunteer to testify before the January 6, House Select Committee investigating Donald Trump's insurrection, Donald Trump's [attempts] to end our democracy,'" Kirschner said.
"That's not, I'm assuming, how Mike Pence's memoirs reads. Why? Because Mike Pence concealed Donald Trump's crimes from law enforcement authorities, from the American people," Kirschner added.
"And thus far, he has concealed the information he has about Donald Trump's unlawful attempts to overturn the results of a presidential election from the Congressional committee investigating the insurrection."
Kirschner goes on to suggest that Pence's actions could have been "felony-ish" as he may have committed a crime known as misprision of felony.
The law states that if a person has knowledge of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States being carried out, but "conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States" then they could face up to three years in prison.
"So that's what Mike Pence did. Conceal, and did not as soon as possible, report Donald Trump's crimes," Kirschner said.
During the January 6 insurrection, Trump supporters were heard chanting "hang Mike Pence" in the Capitol's corridors.
Even as the riot was taking place, Trump tweeted that Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done" by stopping the election results from being confirmed in favor of Joe Biden.
In his book, Pence confirms that Trump never reached out to him to check on his safety on January 6, but the pair did meet five days later.
Pence writes that during the meeting, Trump said he had only just been made aware that Pence's wife and daughter were also at the Capitol during the riot. The former president then asked whether Pence and his family were "scared" during the violence.
"'No,' I replied, 'I was angry,'" Pence wrote. "'You and I had our differences that day, Mr. President, and seeing those people tearing up the Capitol infuriated me.'"
Trump and Pence's relationship never recovered following the Capitol riot, with Trump confirming he has no intentions of asking Pence to be running mate for the third time in his expected presidential bid in 2024.
Pence has been contacted for comment.
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more