Mike Pence ‘testifies to grand jury for seven hours’ about Donald Trump and the 2021 US Capitol riots

Former US vice chairman Mike Pence has appeared earlier than a federal grand jury investigating former president Donald Trump’s position in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, based on experiences.

Mr Pence was contained in the US District Court in Washington for greater than seven hours on Thursday, NBC News reported.

Security was beefed up on the federal courthouse and a sniffer canine was noticed within the hallway.

His testimony – behind closed doorways – comes lower than 24 hours after a federal appeals court docket rejected a last-ditch attraction by Mr Trump’s authorized workforce to dam his look.

Mr Pence can also be reportedly exploring a attainable problem to Mr Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Mr Trump launched his third bid for the US presidency in November.

Incumbent Democrat president, Joe Biden, additionally confirmed he’ll run once more in 2024 this week.

Mr Pence’s testimony on Thursday is a big growth within the Justice Department’s investigation and is probably going to present prosecutors a key first-person account of sure conversations and occasions within the weeks previous the lethal assault on the US Capitol.

Asked about his testimony, Mr Trump, who was at a marketing campaign occasion in New Hampshire, informed NBC News: “I don’t know what he said, but I have a lot of confidence in him.”

Mr Pence is taken into account a significant witness within the felony investigation led by Jack Smith, a former battle crimes prosecutor.

“We’ll obey the law, we’ll tell the truth,” Mr Pence stated in an interview with CBS News aired on Sunday.

“And the story that I’ve been telling the American people all across the country, the story that I wrote in the pages of my memoir, that’ll be the story I tell in that setting.”

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Mr Pence has spoken extensively about Mr Trump urging him to reject President Biden’s election victory within the days main as much as 6 January 2021, together with in his ebook, So Help Me God.

“For four years, we had a close working relationship. It did not end well,” he wrote, summing up their time within the White House.

He has beforehand defended his actions on that day, after Mr Trump had claimed {that a} vice chairman had the authority to overturn the election outcomes.

“President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election,” Mr Pence, who has usually shied away from confronting his former boss, stated in March.

“And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Mr Smith is individually investigating Mr Trump over the potential mishandling of lots of of categorised paperwork at his Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida, in addition to attainable efforts to hinder that probe.