Federal prosecutors have asked a judge to compel Vice President Mike Pence to comply with a grand jury subpoena for his testimony in a criminal investigation of ex-President Donald Trump for efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden, a latest report says.
The sealed motion, filed in recent days with Chief Judge Beryl Howell in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., got here after attorneys for Trump asserted executive privilege over Pence’s subpoena, CBS News reported Thursday.
On Wednesday, The Recent York Times reported that special counsel Jack Smith, who’s overseeing the probe, obtained grand jury subpoenas compelling the testimony of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Each Ivanka Trump and Kushner served as senior White House advisors during her father’s administration.
Trump previously sought to exercise executive privilege — which allows certain presidential communications to be kept confidential — over grand jury testimony within the probe, news outlets have reported.
He has also tried to invoke it in other recent legal matters, including a battle over the tons of of documents seized by the FBI last summer from his personal residence at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. Smith is also leading a criminal probe of Trump in reference to that case.
Smith’s motion to compel Pence’s testimony within the election investigation asks Howell to uphold the legal authority of the grand jury subpoena, in response to CBS, which cited people acquainted with the case.
Pence’s spokesman, when asked concerning the report by CNBC, pointed to CBS’ reporting that Howell recently issued a gag order barring people involved within the probe from commenting on it.
Howell on Thursday rejected an effort by media outlets to access records related to the grand jury investigation.
A spokesman for Smith declined to comment to CNBC. An attorney for Trump didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Pence last week said he would fight the subpoena.
“No vice chairman in American history has ever been compelled to testify against a president with whom they serve,” Pence said.
Pence plans to argue that his former role as president of the Senate — which he held by virtue of being vice chairman of the US — means he is roofed by the Structure’s “speech or debate” clause, which may protect legislative branch members from legal threats related to their work.
An attorney for Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., cited that clause earlier Thursday, telling a federal appeals court that the Justice Department has no authority to look the congressman’s cellular phone as a part of the agency’s probe of Trump.
Individually, the FBI seized a classified document in a search of Pence’s home earlier this month.
That consensual search was scheduled weeks after an attorney for Pence alerted the federal government to a “small number” of records with classified markings that were found at his residence.
Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed Smith as special counsel in November, in response to Trump’s announcement that he’s running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
At the tip of his first term in office on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump urged Pence to assist challenge the election results by rejecting key Electoral College votes for Biden.
After Pence refused, a violent mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, sending the vice chairman and congressional lawmakers into hiding.
Pence, who’s teasing a possible White House run of his own, said he believes there might be “higher selections” than Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
