Former President Donald Trump’s diatribe before and during the U.S. Capitol riot last year endangered American citizens, including the vice president himself, Mike Pence, then-Vice President of the Trump administration, said in an interview on television that airs this Monday.
“The words of the president that day at the rally (before the riot) put my life, the lives of my family and everyone on Capitol Hill in danger,” Mike Pence, who is reportedly laying the groundwork for a race, told ABC News. 2024, in which he would face his former boss – Trump summoned the media to his Florida home on Tuesday night, ostensibly to announce his own candidacy for the White House.
Pence’s interview, which will air on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” coincides with Tuesday’s release of his memoir, “So Help Me God.”
The Republican veteran told ABC that on Jan. 6, 2021, in his famous speech in a park near the White House, Trump incited the crowd that then marched toward the Capitol: “The president’s words were reckless. It was clear that he had decided to be part of the problem.”
Pence said he was “exasperated” when he read a tweet from Trump that day claiming that the vice president “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” to keep Trump in office, causing congressional certification of the Trump’s election victory was blocked. Biden in 2020. .
“I turned to my daughter, who was standing nearby, and said, ‘It doesn’t take courage to break the law. It takes courage to enforce the law,'” Pence said.
The vice president was on Capitol Hill at the time, and U.S. Secret Service officials escorted him out of the Senate chamber, where he narrowly avoided meeting protesters who stormed the compound.
So far, Pence has been largely silent about his interactions with Trump leading up to the mob’s Jan. 6 attack.
In an excerpt from his memoir, published last week by the Wall Street Journal, Pence said he spoke to Trump by phone on New Year’s Day 2021, expressing his refusal to participate in a plan to keep Trump in power.
“You’re too honest,” Pence told Trump. “Hundreds of thousands will hate your courage… People will think you are stupid.”
Source: DN
