Donald Trump has praised former Vice President Mike Pence just one day after Pence was issued with a subpoena as part of an investigation into the former president's handling of classified documents.
Trump gave an interview to Fox News Digital on Friday where he defended his former vice presidential running mate and later took to his Truth Social platform to criticize Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Smith, who is investigating Trump's handling of White House documents found at his Mar-a-Lago residence, issued a subpoena to Pence on Thursday after months of negotiations between investigators and Pence's legal team.
"Mike Pence is an honorable man," Trump told Fox News Digital as he went on to list topics he believed the special counsel's probe should be investigating - revisiting issues he's raised repeatedly, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
"Are they going to look for the people that spied on my campaign?" the former president asked.
On Truth Social, Trump also criticized the special counsel and appeared to defend former Vice President Pence.
"Will Trump Hating Prosecutor Jack Smith be investigating the FACT that they SPIED on my campaign, even as I was in the Oval Office, they Stuffed the Ballot Boxes (per 2000 Mules), used Covid to cheat, that the FBI pushed Twitter & Facebook around, causing massive voter disruption, and so much more?" Trump wrote.
"That's really what he should be looking at, not asking a very decent Mike Pence why he didn't send the votes back to State Legislatures for scrutinization, which he could have done. Get the RIGGERS!" he added.
Trump had earlier defended Pence after documents were found at his home, writing on Truth Social on January 24: "Mike Pence is an innocent man. He never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life. Leave him alone!!!"
In January, lawyers for Pence searched his Indiana home and found what attorney Greg Jacob described as "a small number of documents that could potentially contain sensitive or classified information interspersed throughout the records."
Those documents were collected by the FBI but on Friday one additional classified document was found at the former vice president's home after a five-hour search conducted with the Pence team's co-operation.
While Trump has defended Pence amid the investigation into classified documents, he has been highly critical of his former vice president in the past for Pence's refusal to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2021.
Pence publicly broke with Trump on the matter, saying he did not have the power to reject Electoral College votes.
In June last year, Trump told an audience of Christian conservatives in Nashville: "Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be, frankly, historic.
"Mike, and I say it sadly because I like him, but Mike did not have the courage to act."
Newsweek has reached out to Mike Pence's advocacy group for comment.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Darragh Roche is a U.S. News Reporter based in Limerick, Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. politics. He has ... Read more
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