Former President Donald Trump’s legal team is appealing a sealed order requiring limited testimony from Mike Pence in the hopes of preventing the former vice president from testifying in a Department of Justice special counsel investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The sealed appeal was filed Monday in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., coming just days after Pence said he would not fight a judge’s order for his testimony before the federal grand jury, NBC News reported.
“Vice President Mike Pence swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and his claim that the Biden special counsel’s unprecedented subpoena was unconstitutional under the speech or debate clause was an important one made to preserve the separation of powers outlined by our founders,” said Pence adviser Devin O’Malley in a statement last week.
“Vice President Pence will not appeal the Judge’s ruling and will comply with the subpoena as required by law,” O’Malley added.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, cited executive privilege and attorney-client privilege in a statement.
“The DOJ is continuously stepping far outside the standard norms in attempting to destroy the long accepted, long held, Constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege,” Cheung said. “The Special Counsel is conducting a witch-hunt where the government has sought to violate every Constitutional norm, including the safeguards that protect a President’s ability to confer with his Vice President on matters of the security of the United States.”
Trump commented in a Truth Social post on the reasoning behind the “absolutely ridiculous investigations” stacked up against him — in all caps.
“The only reason I have these absolutely ridiculous investigations against me, headed up by racists, lunatics, and radical left maniacs, is for the purpose of election interference,” he wrote.
“It will be harder for the Democrats to cheat like they did in 2020, so they are going right to the old Soviet Union playbook and using the DOJ, FBI, [and] others in ‘Justice’ to interfere in our once sacred elections,” Trump added. “We’ve got to swamp these cheaters, and we will win!”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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