Orange Meltdown, Con't

Team Trump has lost yet another court fight trying to block his former VP Mike Pence from testifying in front of a grand jury for Special Counsel Jack Smith.

 

 

Former President Donald Trump has lost an emergency attempt to block former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying about their direct conversations, in the latest boost to a federal criminal investigation examining Trump’s and others’ actions after the 2020 election.

The former president has repeatedly tried and failed to close off some answers from witnesses close to him in the special counsel’s investigation. This latest order from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals likely will usher in Pence’s grand jury testimony quickly – an unprecedented development in modern presidential history.

The decision, from Judges Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins and Greg Katsas on the DC Circuit, came in a sealed case on Wednesday night that CNN previously identified as Trump’s executive privilege challenge to Pence. No dissents were noted on the public docket.

Trump has tried to block Pence from testifying about their direct communications, even after the former vice president wrote about some of those exchanges and a lower-court judge had ruled against him.

Trump asked the DC Circuit for emergency intervention weeks ago. The court refused to put on hold Pence’s subpoena and to override the lower-court ruling, flatly denying Trump’s requests.

Trump could try to appeal again and even press the issue at the Supreme Court. Yet he gave up pushing several past executive privilege challenges to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation after similar rulings from this court of appeals.

Pence has already said he was not appealing part of a lower court’s decision, and would comply with the subpoena. Judge James Boasberg of the DC District Court has acknowledged Pence could have some congressional protections during the time he served as president of the Senate on January 6, 2021. But that ruling does not appear to prevent him from answering questions before the grand jury about his many conversations with Trump from Election Day on, when Trump and his allies were pressuring Pence to block the congressional certification of the vote.

 

Trump's folks are going to tell him that the last thing he wants is a SCOTUS ruling that can be used against him in the future should he be reelected, and Trump's ego is gargantuan enough to be swayed by that argument. 

But the wheels of justice continue to grind on as Jack Smith and Merrick Garland slowly put together the pieces to build an impregnable case. Too slowly for some, and there are days, but I have to believe that justice will come.

The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.