At a CNN town hall last night, former vice-president Mike Pence proclaimed his fealty to the rule of law and then proceeded to decry the Justice Department for its looming plans to indict former president Donald Trump: “Now more than ever, we should be finding ways that we can come together. And this kind of action by the Department of Justice, I think, would only fuel, uh, further division in the country. And let me also say, I think it would send a terrible message to the wider world.”
CNN’s Dana Bash pressed him to reconcile the contradiction between praising the rule of law and insisting his former boss be categorically exempt from criminal prosecution. At this point he began to ramble.
“Let me be clear that no one is above the law. But with regard to the unique circumstances here, it, look, I — [holds hands to heart] those classified, I had no business having classified documents in my residence,” said Pence.
Pence noted that he, along with Joe Biden and Trump, had taken classified documents. He did not acknowledge the highly pertinent distinction: that he and Biden had promptly returned the documents they improperly removed, while Trump simply refused and reportedly engaged in an elaborate cover-up.
From this misleading premise, he returned to his comfortable stance of piety: “I would just hope there would be a way for them to move forward, without the dramatic and drastic and divisive step of indicting a former president of the United States. We’ve got to find a way to move forward and restore confidence in equal treatment under the law in this country.”
He’s obviously correct that it would be “divisive” to prosecute Donald Trump. On the other hand, it was also divisive to elect Donald Trump president in the first place, and Pence was very much in favor of that.
In fairness to Pence, prosecutors have discretion as to how they enforce the law, and maximal enforcement is not always the wisest or fairest course of action. (The Manhattan district attorney’s decision to prosecute Trump, while legally defensible, seems like a shaky decision.) But Trump has reportedly engaged in blatant, repetitive defiance of government laws concerning classified documents. Pence is willing to grant him blanket immunity from prosecution, even in the face of behavior that would be a no-brainer charge if any other person had done it.
And he casts this position as a defense of “confidence in equal treatment under the law in this country.” Which means, to Pence, that Republicans should not have to confront evidence that the career criminal they elected president continued committing crimes.
