Special counsel pushes to use Pence against Trump in 2020 election case

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

41% : At the White House on 4 January 2021, prosecutors wrote, Trump deliberately excluded his White House counsel from attending a meeting with Pence - meaning the only attorney in the room was Eastman.
36% : The response from Trump's lawyers is almost certain to be that Trump was calling state officials because he was executing the clause in the US constitution that the president has a duty to ensure the general election was run without interference or fraud.
32% : According to the redacted brief, prosecutors want to use Trump's conversations with Pence in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, interactions between Trump and Pence and other private actors, as well as interactions between White House aides and private actors.
30% : The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump's pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.
29% : And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.
28% : Prosecutors added that the conversations between Trump and Pence that they wanted to present at trial should be allowed because there was nothing official about them discussing electoral prospects as candidates for office.
27% : For instance, prosecutors argued that evidence of Trump using personal lawyers Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman to pressure Pence should be permitted, since using private actors to commit a crime would not be an official act of the presidency or infringe on the functioning of the executive branch.
24% : The brief's principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court's recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.
22% : As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.
21% : And on a 5 January 2021 phone call, prosecutors wrote, Trump and Eastman were the only ones on the line to make a final effort to pressure Pence to drop his objections and agree not to count slates of electors for Joe Biden when he presided over the congressional certification the next day.
18% : Referencing previously undisclosed evidence, prosecutors showed that Pence at various points suggested that "the process was over" and that Trump consider running again in 2024 - key evidence that Trump was on notice from his own running mate that he had lost the election.
16% : The bottom line from prosecutors was that each of the episodes reflected Trump acting not as president but as a candidate for office, which meant the default presumption that conversations between Trump and Pence were official could be rebutted.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.