(CNN) Former Vice President Mike Pence testified Thursday to a federal grand jury investigating the aftermath of the 2020 election and the actions of President Donald Trump and others, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
The testimony marked a significant phase in the criminal investigation and the first time in modern history that a vice president has been forced to testify about the president he served.
Pence testified for more than five hours, a source familiar with the matter told CNN, and while adviser Marc Short did not confirm Thursday’s appearance, he addressed legal challenges to the testimony.
“I think that the vice president, you know, has his own case based on the Speech and Debate Clause. He’s happy that for the first time a judge has recognized that it applies to the vice president of the United States,” said Short said in an interview with NewsNation afterward. “But he was willing to obey the law, and the courts ordered him to testify.”
Pence is preparing to recount for the first time under oath his direct conversations with Trump until January 6, 2021. Trump has repeatedly pressured him unsuccessfully to block the outcome of the 2020 election, including morning of January 6 in a private phone call, and a federal judge previously ruled that Pence could be forced to account for conversations between the two men in which Trump may have acted corruptly.
Pence’s meeting with investigators comes as he examines a possible challenge to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, with his testimony likely to draw a strong negative reaction from his former boss.
As part of his political appearances and recent book tour, Pence often talks about refusing to do Trump’s bidding on January 6 and instead following the Constitution. But he avoided speaking under oath as part of any investigation.
The grand jury in Washington, DC, whose proceedings are secret, convened just before 9 a.m. ET on Thursday. This coincided with increased security inside the courthouse and two SUVs with tinted windows were seen transporting people to the building.
A spokesman for the office of special counsel Jack Smith and a spokeswoman for Pence both declined to comment Thursday.
Court battle
Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to obstruct the election results has long sought to question Pence under oath because of his proximity to Trump in the White House.
Both Pence and Trump went to court to stop his unprecedented subpoena. But trial and appellate judges ordered Pence to testify about his direct conversations with the president in the past — rulings consistent with several other bankruptcy courts Trump has faced as he tries to block the chief officials from his administration to testify.
The latest decision — from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, which refused to grant Trump emergency aid — came Wednesday night.
The case puts Pence in a unique position to challenge the powers of his former office — and the court even gave the former vice president the ability to exclude his actions while in office from criminal proceedings. as the presiding officer of the Senate on January 6. However, most of what Smith’s team wants can be obtained by the grand jury.
Pence and Trump before the January 6 communication
Trump’s conversations with Pence and about Pence in the days before the riots at the US Capitol are of great interest to investigators looking into the attack.
Although Pence declined to testify before the House select committee investigating the insurrection, people in Trump’s orbit told the committee about a heated phone call he had with Pence on the day of the impeachment. -attack where he insulted his vice president. Pence and Trump did not speak during the attack on the Capitol itself, where many of Trump’s supporters angrily sought him out, and Pence narrowly escaped the mob on his way to the Senate floor.
Much of what is known about Trump’s communications with Pence leading up to the uprising comes from a memoir the former vice president published last year, as well as from people who testified to a House investigation into the attack. .
Nicholas Luna, a former special assistant to Trump, said he remembers Trump calling Pence a “wimp.” Luna said she remembered something to the effect of Trump saying, “I made the wrong decision four or five years ago.”
And Julie Radford, Ivanka Trump’s former chief of staff, said she remembers Ivanka Trump telling her that “her father just had an upsetting conversation with the vice president.”
Radford said he was told Trump called Pence “the P-word,” referring to a derogatory term.
As for Pence, many of his public comments are about his conversations with Trump in the days before and after the insurrection he revealed in his memoir.
In the book, Pence wrote that Trump told him in the days before the attack that he would incite the hatred of hundreds of thousands of people because he was “too honest” to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. election.
The former vice president also said in the book that he asked his general counsel for a briefing on Electoral Count Act procedures after Trump in a Dec. 5 phone call “discussed challenging the results of elections to the House of Representatives for the first time.”
At lunch on Dec. 21, Pence wrote, he tried to get Trump to listen to the White House counsel’s advice, instead of outside lawyers, a suggestion the former president shot down.
And Pence wrote that Trump told him in a New Year’s phone call: “You are very honest,” predicting that “hundreds of thousands will hate your guts” and “people will think you stupid.”
“Mr. President, I have no doubt that there were irregularities and fraud,” Pence wrote that he told Trump. “It’s just a question of who decides, and under the law that is Congress.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Kristen Holmes, Lauren Koenig, Aileen Graef, Andrew Millman and Holmes Lybrand contributed to this report.
