Pence Still Twisting the Truth for Trump
Pence Still Twisting the Truth for Trump
The former VP can’t help himself from joining other Republicans in misrepresenting the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
REPUBLICANS HAVE LARGELY agreed on a unified message about Donald Trump’s indictment for abusing classified documents: The former president, they say, is the victim of a partisan Department of Justice.
This message is false. Trump is being prosecuted because he—unlike other former officials who were found to have such documents—withheld and sought to conceal his documents from the government, even under subpoena. His apologists try to obscure this distinction. They pretend that he’s been targeted not for his conduct but because he’s a Republican.
The most remarkable peddler of this nonsense is Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence. He, too, had classified documents in boxes at his home. But unlike Trump, Pence cooperated with the government and returned the documents. And what did the supposedly partisan DOJ do in Pence’s case? It chose not to prosecute him.
So Pence knows firsthand that the department is making its decisions based on facts, not party. Yet he pretends the opposite.
FOR WEEKS, PENCE HAS BEEN making the rounds on conservative media, moaning about DOJ’s purported bias. “We have witnessed, in fact, the weaponization of the law in the political realm . . . against our administration—and now against the former president here, potentially,” he told Hugh Hewitt on June 9, the day after Trump was indicted. Five days later, in a Fox Business interview, Pence complained to Larry Kudlow that DOJ was failing to “move with equal vigor” in its investigation of classified material found at President Joe Biden’s home and former office.
Last week, after DOJ struck a plea bargain with Hunter Biden, Pence fretted that the department was practicing “a two-tiered system of justice, like one set of rules for Republicans and one set of rules for Democrats.” Again, that insinuation was demonstrably false: Hunter Biden was prosecuted at least as aggressively as anyone else accused of the same crimes. And those crimes, which involved late tax payments and unlawful possession of a firearm, had nothing to do with classified records.
Pence doesn’t just parrot the talking point about bias in law enforcement. He claims to be a victim of it. “I lived through the years of politicization,” he told Hewitt. He repeated that line later in the day at a speech in New Hampshire, the next day at another campaign stop in North Carolina, and five days later in an interview with Buck Sexton and Clay Travis. “We lived through it,” Pence told Kudlow, recounting his suffering through “seven years of politicization in the Justice Department.”
Pence’s fantasies of martyrdom peaked on June 16, when he poured out his troubles to NBC’s Chuck Todd. In that interview, which aired two days later on Meet the Press, Pence called Trump’s federal indictment “one more example of a two-tiered justice system that we've been living through for seven years. . . . It appears as though Democrats get one level of treatment, and Republicans—especially those of us in the Trump-Pence administration—get another.”
“Those of us in the Trump-Pence administration”? What a crock.
On June 1, two weeks before that interview, Pence’s lawyer had received a letter from DOJ informing him that Pence wouldn’t be charged for his handling of the classified documents found at his home. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department’s National Security Division have conducted an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information,” said the letter. “Based on the results of that investigation, no criminal charges will be sought.”
After receiving that letter, Pence could have told the truth: that DOJ’s decision in his case disproved, or at least called into question, Republican paranoia about weaponized law enforcement. He could have acknowledged what the letter illustrated: that people who return classified documents to the government in good faith are treated fairly and equally, whether their names are Biden or Pence. Instead, Pence has obscured the facts of his case and maligned DOJ.
On June 7, as reports circulated that Trump would be indicted, Pence spoke at a CNN town hall. The moderator, Dana Bash, noted that Pence, unlike Trump, had cooperated with the government in returning classified material. She asked Pence: “Full cooperation. Do you see [Trump’s] case as different?”
Rather than concede her point, Pence pleaded ignorance and impugned DOJ’s fairness. “I don’t know the facts of the former president’s case,” said Pence, straining credulity. “What we have got to have in this country is equal treatment under the law.” He rebuked the feds for their search of Trump’s estate—“There had to be dozens of ways that could have been handled, other than that kind of behavior”—leaving out the fact that Trump, unlike Pence and Biden, had exhausted the government’s patience by lying and stonewalling for a year and a half.
Pence also concocted a falsehood about Biden’s case. He told Bash:
When I informed the Department of Justice that we had classified materials potentially in our home . . . the FBI was on my front doorstep the next day. And what we found out was that when Joe Biden apparently alerted the Department of Justice, 80 days later they showed up at his office. That’s not equal treatment under the law. And we have got to end this two-tiered system of justice.
The next day, Pence repeated that story in a radio interview with Sean Hannity:
In my own circumstances, when we alerted the Justice Department that we had found documents that inadvertently had been transferred back to my home in Indiana, the FBI was on my front doorstep the next day. What press has reported is that it took 80 days for the FBI to go to the office or the residence of President Joe Biden. Now, that doesn’t sound like equal treatment in the law to me.
No, it certainly doesn’t sound like equal treatment. What it does sound like, however, is fiction.
Here’s what actually happened. Biden’s lawyers found classified files at one of his old offices on November 2, 2022. That day, the White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives. The next morning, the Archives took possession of the files. The day after that, November 4, the inspector general of the Archives contacted a prosecutor at DOJ. On November 9, the FBI launched a formal assessment of the case. On November 14, Attorney General Merrick Garland assigned a U.S. attorney to investigate the case. According to CBS News, the FBI searched the relevant Biden office in “mid-November.”
So in fact, the government reclaimed documents immediately, a DOJ prosecutor was engaged within two days, the FBI was on the case within five days, and the premises were searched within about two weeks. Pence’s “80 days” story is bogus.
That hasn’t stopped Pence from smearing DOJ and bragging that he’ll fire every senior official at the department and at the FBI. “I’m going to clean house at the highest levels of the Justice Department,” he told Hewitt on June 9. “We’re going to appoint men and women of integrity at every level that will restore the public confidence of the American people in equal justice . . . We’re going to clean house all across the top floors, whether it’s the Justice Department or whether it’s the FBI.”
Five days later, Pence specifically said he would fire FBI Director Chris Wray, a Trump appointee, on “Day One.”
That’s how Pence rolls. He calls the FBI biased for perpetrating the so-called “Russia hoax” (it wasn’t a hoax), while he ignores the FBI’s role in getting Trump elected by issuing a damning last-minute letter against Hillary Clinton. The Justice Department proves its good faith by telling Pence he won’t be prosecuted, and he responds by disparaging the department’s integrity.
Pence loves to talk about being a Christian and a constitutionalist. I’m grateful that he refused to overturn the 2020 presidential election, but that’s a low bar. Like so many others who defended and abetted Trump’s conduct in office, Pence has become marvelously adept at shading facts, peddling falsehoods, and smearing anyone who tries to hold Trump accountable. He just does it with extra piety.