Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff sells out Donald Trump to January 6th Committee

| 9:09 am EST February 1, 2022
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Mike Pence doesn’t appear eager to testify to the January 6th Committee. And while the committee can subpoena him and even criminally refer him for failure to comply, that might get tricky from an optics standpoint, given that Pence was a victim on January 6th. In any case, it turns out the committee doesn’t need Pence anymore. And for that matter, it just got a lot harder for Pence to justify refusing to testify.

Mike Pence’s vice presidential chief of staff Marc Short has given lengthy testimony to the January 6th Committee, per CNN. As various committee members have previously spelled out, lengthy testimony means a witness has cooperated; uncooperative answers or pleading the fifth would go quickly. So it’s safe to conclude that Short’s testimony was cooperative, and that he has therefore told the committee everything he knows about conversations between Trump and Pence in relation to January 6th and the attempted overthrow of the election. Given Short’s position as Pence’s chief of staff, he likely knows most of what went on between Trump and Pence.

So now the committee has a witness who has spelled out precisely the crimes that Donald Trump committed in relation to Mike Pence on and before January 6th. Now that Short has spilled his guts behind the scenes, he’s pretty much locked into coming back and publicly testifying during the committee’s televised primetime hearings.

As Short is explaining to Americans what was going on between Trump and Pence, it’ll surely lead to questions about why Pence himself is refusing to show up and give this testimony. Pence is presumably trying to avoid testifying so he can remain in the good graces of the portion of Trump’s base that didn’t try to kill him, so he can use a failed 2024 presidential run as a launching point for a multimillion dollar book deal. But if Pence concludes that his absence from the televised hearings makes him look too bad, he may have to at least consider testifying. But again, now that the committee has Pence’s chief of staff, it doesn’t need Pence. It has someone who was in the room where it happened.