Former Vice President Mike Pence will have to testify before a federal grand jury regarding his conversations with former President Donald Trump about the events of January 6, 2021, according to a report by CNN.
CNN chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju tweeted the report that a federal judge had issued the ruling requiring Pence to testify against the ex-president.
The ruling still remains under seal, but multiple sources told CNN about its contents.
The former president has repeatedly failed in his attempts to claim executive privilege to block subpoenas requesting documents and testimony from him and various people who served in the Trump administration.
Pence will still have the ability to appeal this ruling, and CNN reports one source said the order says he “can still decline to answer questions related to his actions on January 6 itself, when he was serving as president of the Senate for the certification of the 2020 presidential election.”
CNN’s Katelyn Polantz reported that the ruling was issued Monday by Jeb Boasberg, the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and related to “the conversations before January 6th when Donald Trump and Mike Pence were on the phone, one on one, and Donald Trump apparently was berating him, calling him names, that sort of thing.”
Pence “got a little bit of a win himself,” said Polantz, in the judge’s ruling that he would have some protection regarding his official role presiding over the Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 itself, but he would still have to answer these “crucial questions” about what happened before that date and his conversations with Trump.
The ruling was “another victory for Special Counsel Jack Smith,” Polantz told anchor Alex Marquardt, citing Smith’s multiple court victories in pushing back against Trump’s attempts to block testimony and subpoenas. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November to oversee the investigations into both Jan. 6 and the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
