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Mike Pence Still Walks a Shaky Line Between Courage and Cold Feet

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Now Donald Trump wants to blame Mike Pence for the people who shouted, “Hang Mike Pence”?

Amazingly, the former president has sharply rebuked his former vice president’s contention that history will hold Trump accountable for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Instead Trump told reporters Monday that it is Pence who should bear the blame for the violent riot by Trump’s supporters.

All he had to do, Trump said, was take the law into his own hands.

“Had he sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6,” Trump said, referring to Pence’s refusal to reject the Electoral College votes in Congress as Trump wanted him to do that day. “So in many ways you can blame him for Jan. 6.”

“Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, No. 1, you would have had a different outcome,” Trump added. “But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6,′ as we call it.”

 

Isn’t that classic Trump? When reality doesn’t suit him, he bends it.

Trump sounds like he is still clinging to the ambiguous provisions of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, with which some of his lawyers tried unsuccessfully to delay or even overrule the 2020 electoral vote count that President Joe Biden won.

Congress has since updated the act, but Trump still hangs onto the old ambiguities, if only to stir more suspicions like those that drove the pro-Trump Jan. 6 mob after months of the former president’s false stolen election claims.

Trump had been asked about Pence’s criticisms of him and Fox News host Tucker Carlson over Jan. 6, along with Pence’s praise of the media that Trump constantly calls “fake news.”

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