Former president Donald Trump doubled down on his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged during a CNN town hall on Wednesday and accused former vice president Mike Pence of making a “mistake” by certifying electoral votes for the election.
CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins asked Trump if he felt he owed Pence an apology for January 6.
“No, because he did something wrong. He should’ve put the votes back to the state legislatures and I think we would’ve had a different outcome,” he said.
Trump said Pence “made a mistake” by listening to lawyers who said he could not push back against the certification.
“I like Mike Pence very much, he’s a very fine man, a very nice man,” Trump said. “He made a mistake.”
Pence, who is expected to enter the 2024 primary shortly, has said that Trump “endangered” him and his family by attacking him on social media during the Capitol riot.
Moments after Pence and his family were taken to a secure location in the Capitol to hide from rioters, Trump tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
The former president claimed the lawyers were wrong because “right after the elections they all met — the RINOs and the Democrats — to make sure that future vice presidents can’t do what I said they can do.”
Collins pushed back against Trump’s assertions, saying Pence did not have the power and clarifying that lawyers passed the Electoral Count Act which, among other things, stresses that the vice president does not have the authority to overturn election results and is solely “ministerial.”
“Mike had the right to do it, they convinced him they didn’t and it was horrible thing for our country,” he said, falsely claiming he had won Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
“He did have the right to do it and that’s why they changed the law taking the right away,” he added.
At the conclusion of the town hall, Trump would not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election regardless of outcome, saying only that he would accept the results if he thinks it was an “honest election.”
Trump also brushed off the recent Manhattan jury verdict that found him liable for battery and defamation in a lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll.
The nine-person jury ordered the former president to pay Carroll $5 million in combined damages.
Jurors were asked to determine whether there was more than a 50 percent chance that Trump assaulted Carroll in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan in the mid 1990s, as she has claimed. The jury found that Trump most likely sexually assaulted Carroll but rejected the allegation that he raped her. The jury also decided that an October 2022 post from Trump on his Truth Social platform calling her allegations a “hoax” did, in fact, defame Carroll.
On Wednesday, Trump reiterated his assertion that he does not know Carroll and “has no idea who she is.”
He claimed the judge in the case would not allow his lawyers to include evidence about Carroll and said his poll numbers went up after the verdict just as they did after “the other fake charge” brought by a Manhattan district attorney in the hush-money case.
He called Carroll a “wack job” and asked “what kind of a woman meets somebody and .,.within minutes you’re playing hanky panky in a dressing room.”
He noted the jury found he did not rape her and said, “I didn’t do anything else. I have no idea who the Hell she is.”
He said he wanted to testify in the trial but his lawyers told him not to.
Trump came to the town hall prepared with a printed out list of his social-media posts from January 6 and defended his rhetoric ahead of and during the Capitol riot. He faulted then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom he called “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” and Mayor Muriel Bowser for the riot. He claimed he offered to deploy the National Guard but Pelosi and Bowser turned down the offer. Though then-acting secretary of defense Chritopher Miller said Trump never gave a formal order to deploy the National Guard.
Trump said he would be “inclined” to pardon many of the January 6 rioters who have been convicted of federal offenses and called the U.S. Capitol police officer who fatally shot rioter Ashli Babbitt “a thug.” “There was no reason to shoot her, she was a good person,” he said.
The officer who shot Babbitt was cleared of criminal wrongdoing and did not face charges. Authorities found there was insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution of the unnamed officer. The investigation concluded that it was reasonable for the officer to believe he was firing in self-defense or in defense of members of Congress and aides who were fleeing the House chamber.
Cellphone videos of the January 6 siege show 35-year-old Babbitt and other rioters forcing their way inside the Capitol to barricaded doors leading to the Speaker’s Lobby — the hallway outside the House chamber where a number of lawmakers were sheltering during the riots. The group attempted to take down the doors with a helmet, their feet and a flagpole. A Capitol Police officer is seen on video standing in a doorway on the far side of the doors with his gun drawn.
The officer shot Babbitt in the shoulder as she tried to crawl through one of the broken panes of the doors, video shows.