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As Donald Trump weighs his running-mate options, it’s not a secret that House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and Sen. J.D. Vance are among the contenders. The result has been an unfortunate race to the bottom, in which the New York congresswoman and the Ohio senator have gone back and forth for months, each trying to one-up the other in the hopes of impressing the former president.
This week, for example, Stefanik filed a ridiculous ethics complaint against special counsel Jack Smith with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The complaint is baseless, and there’s no chance it’ll be taken seriously, but for the House GOP leader, that’s irrelevant: The goal was to send a signal to Mar-a-Lago, not Main Justice.
It also meant, of course, that it was Vance’s turn to come up with a gesture that his party’s presumptive presidential nominee might like. It was against this backdrop that, as The Hill reported, the Ohioan appeared on CNN last night.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said Wednesday he is “skeptical” that former Vice President Pence’s life was endangered during the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol.
In context, Kaitlan Collins asked a good question that we’ll hopefully hear repeated in the coming weeks and months with other Republican contenders: “You said you’d certainly be open to [the vice presidential nomination] if he did offer it to you. Considering that, does it give you any pause whatsoever about taking that job when you see how he treated his last vice president?”
In other words, given that Trump put his last running mate in danger, maybe others might be cautious about filling Pence’s shoes.
Vance not only disagreed, he challenged the premise of the question.
“Okay, well, I’m truly skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger. I think politics and politics people like to really exaggerate things from time to time,” the Senate Republican said.
As for the Jan. 6 rioters who literally chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” Vance said last night that “a few people” said “some bad things,” but he insisted it was “absurd” to hold Trump accountable for his radical followers’ rhetoric.
Vance’s comments come three years after Trump personally defended rioters’ “hang Mike Pence” chants, describing the mantra as “common sense.”
But I was particularly interested in the idea that Pence might not have faced actual, life-threatening danger during the right-wing assault on the Capitol. To hear Vance tell it, perhaps “politics people” have exaggerated the whole story.
Reality tells a very different story. In fact, whether the senator realizes this or not, Vance has this backwards.
When the Hoosier was evacuated from his ceremonial office and directed to a secure location on Jan. 6, investigators ultimately learned that, at one point, Pence and the mob were only separated by 40 feet. A Proud Boys informant told the FBI that members of the right-wing group attacking the Capitol “would have killed Mike Pence if given a chance.”
A Washington Post analysis published two years ago highlighted the specific instances in which “Pence’s life was in particular danger on Jan. 6, 2021.”
In fact, rioters were eager to target Pence when they arrived on Capitol Hill, but Trump also lashed out at his then-vice president during the riot. As one former White House aide said in recorded testimony, that had the effect of “pouring gasoline on the fire.”
Maybe Vance ignored the revelations from the Jan. 6 investigation. Maybe Vance knows the truth and is choosing to ignore it in the hopes of boosting his national prospects.
Either way, the record is clear, and there's no reason for the GOP senator to be "skeptical" of the truth.