While speaking at an event titled Politics and Eggs at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, Pence said he would consider an invitation to participate in the January 6 committee, but not without “due consideration.”
“If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it. But you've heard me mention the Constitution a few times this morning,” Pence told listeners at Saint Anselm College on Wednesday. “[Through] the Constitution, we have three co-equal branches of government and any invitation that would be directed to me, I would have to reflect on the unique role I was serving as vice president.”
“It’d be unprecedented in history for a vice president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill, but as I’ve said, I don’t want to prejudge, so if there was ever any formal invitation rendered to us, we’d give it due consideration.”
Pence defied Trump during the 2020 presidential election and confirmed then President-elect Joe Biden as the winner, crushing Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election. Pence’s support of American democracy was in defiance of Trump and his supporters who had been falsely claiming that Pence had the power to overturn the outcome.
On January 6, Pence was rushed to safety by security after Trump supporters broke into the Capitol Building, with some rioters yelling, “Hang Mike Pence!”
“President Trump is wrong,” Pence said in a speech in early February of this year to the conservative Federalist Society in Florida. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
“Frankly there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” he added. “Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election. And Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024.”
When asked if the House committee planned on requesting Pence to participate in the hearings, a spokesperson for the team declined to comment.
Despite Pence’s claim that it would be “unprecedented” for a vice president to testify before a congressional committee, some presidents and vice presidents have done so between the years of 1862 and 1983, including then-President Gerald Ford (who was also a former Vice President), who testified before a congressional committee on his decision to pardon former-President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.