Mike Pence Spurned the Jan. 6 Committee. Will He Give the Justice Department the Same Treatment?

The special counsel overseeing the intertwining probes into Donald Trump has issued a subpoena to Mike Pence, setting up a potential legal battle between the former vice president and the Justice Department. It wasn’t clear Friday morning when special counsel, Jack Smith, issued the subpoena, nor was it precisely clear what information he is seeking. But it seems to mark a major escalation in the investigations into the former president, who is under federal scrutiny for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and for his mishandling of classified documents after leaving office. 

Pence could be a key witness in the former inquiry: After Trump exhausted most of his other efforts to undermine the democratic process, he and his allies tried to pressure Pence to prevent Joe Biden’s 2020 victory from being certified January 6. “I hope Mike is going to do the right thing,” Trump said at a rally that morning, as Congress convened to formalize Biden’s win. “Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.” Pence resisted, and Trump ultimately sicced a mob of armed supporters on the Capitol, some of whom stalked the halls calling for the vice president’s execution. “Hang Mike Pence!” the insurrectionists shouted. 

Pence—who is now considering a White House run of his own—could potentially provide the special counsel with insight into Trump’s behind-the-scenes efforts to cling to power in 2020, as well as the violent denouement of his antidemocratic campaign. But it’s not clear the former vice president will be a willing participant. He declined to be interviewed by the January 6 committee— which wrapped its probe last year by issuing four criminal referrals against Trump—on the basis that it would set a “terrible precedent for Congress to summon a vice president of the United States to speak about deliberations that took place at the White House.”

“Congress has no right to my testimony,” Pence told CBS News in November.

It remains to be seen if he feels the same way about the Justice Department, which appointed Smith in November as special counsel in charge of the Trump probes. According to the New York Times, the special counsel had sought a voluntary interview with Pence, but issued a subpoena to compel his testimony after those talks reached an “impasse.” Neither he nor the DOJ appears to have commented publicly on the matter.

Word of the subpoena, first reported by ABC News, came a day before the FBI searched the former vice president’s home for classified documents; Pence acknowledged in January that a “small number” of sensitive materials were found at his Indiana residence, and apparently consented to Friday’s search. Though he and Biden have each faced scrutiny for their handling of classified materials, their situations are markedly different from that of Trump, who took hundreds of sensitive White House materials to Mar-a-Lago after he left office and fought to keep the National Archives from retrieving them, leading to an FBI raid last summer. That probe into the former president is also under Smith’s purview.