Mike Pence says the President and his family are “under an ethical cloud.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is running for the GOP nomination for President in 2024, dodged the question on Sunday of whether he would back Donald Trump if the former President is found guilty of a crime. Instead, he said President Biden “has also trampled on the Constitution of the United States.”
“To be on that stage, I promised to vote for the Republican candidate. I’m still sure, and even more sure after Wednesday night, that the Republican nominee won’t be the former President. Instead, we’ll give the American people a GOP candidate who can beat Joe Biden and the radical left. “I raised my hand to say I’ll support the Republican nominee,” Pence said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”
“I could never support Joe Biden,” Pence said next. “I mean, Joe Biden’s policies have been terrible; he and his family are in some ethical trouble, and Joe Biden has broken the Constitution of the United States and failed to follow our laws. The United States’ southern border caused the worst crisis in American history. That student loan giveaway, where he was going to ask truck drivers to pay their taxes to pay off the student loans of graduate students, was a handout. “So I’ll vote for the Republican winner and keep working hard to ensure it’s me.”
Pence said it was “heartening” to hear from other GOP candidates, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, that they agreed he “did his duty” or “did the right thing” in certifying Biden’s election victory during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
During the first GOP debate, which took place last week in Milwaukee and was hosted by Fox News, Pence said he thought Trump asked him to put him before the Constitution.
“I’ve made it clear that I had hoped that the problems with the 2020 election and the controversies around January 6 would not have come to this and that criminal actions would not have been necessary. “I would have preferred that the American people and only the American people had solved them,” Pence said during a debate on Wednesday. “No one is above the law, though. And President Trump has the same right to be considered innocent as every other American. We will make sure that he gets that, too. But the American people have a right to know that the president asked me to reject or return votes on my own, which is a power that no vice president in American history has ever taken or used. He asked me to choose him over the Constitution, but I’ll always choose the Constitution.”
Also, on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Pence called the recent mass shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, evil, and he promised that if he were elected president, he would speed up the death sentence for mass killers. He also attacked Biden for his record on inflation, record-high mortgage rates, the exit from Afghanistan, and other things.