Mike Pence’s Notes Reveal He Contemplated Skipping Election Certification Vote On January 6 Because Of Loyalty To Trump

Former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly considered former President Donald Trump‘s advice to skip the electoral certification of the presidential election, which he presided over in January 2021 and certified the 2020 election.

In February, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office issued a subpoena to Pence, which prompted the former vice president to participate in interviews where he revealed information from handwritten notes he had taken.

In Pence’s notes taken in December 2020, before the January 6 Capitol riot, he had written, “Not feeling like I should attend electoral count,” because of “too many questions, too many doubts.” He wrote it would be “too hurtful to my friend. Therefore I’m not going to participate in certification of election.”

On Christmas Eve of 2020, Pence made a notation that suggested he would step aside and allow the Senate’s President Pro Tempore, Trump loyalist Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), to assume his position for the electoral certification process.

Pence’s memoir So Help Me God, published in 2022, notes a phone conversation with then-President Trump on Christmas Day in 2020, where Pence reportedly told him, “You know, I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome.”

Pence clarified to Smith’s office that the sentence should have lacked a comma, as both he and the former president understood the limitations of their power.

Another disclosure to Smith’s team revealed that a meeting in the Oval Office on December 21, 2020, had heard Trump himself consider departure from the White House without a fuss.

In August, Smith indicted Trump on four charges. He claimed that Trump, 77, made knowingly false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and conspired to obstruct the certification of the electoral count.

The charges specifically involved direct pressure exerted on Pence in the final days of the Trump administration, which urged him to reject President Joe Biden‘s victory in crucial battleground states. Additionally, there was an alleged scheme orchestrated by attorney John Eastman to send electoral results back to state legislators.

Trump was reportedly furious that the special counsel had subpoenaed his maid at Mar-a-Lago.