Yesterday, outgoing Vice President Mike Pence was removed from the Capitol building by Secret Service after violent, pro-Trump insurrectionists stormed the building in protest of the Congressional certification of Electoral College votes that Pence was presiding over — Electoral College votes that make Joe Biden the official President-elect of the United States, no questions asked.
And according to a new report from CNN, it seems as though some members of the Pence camp believe that Donald Trump may have set his right-hand man up for the whole ordeal.
CNN’s Jim Acosta reports, “President Donald Trump and top White House officials did little to check in on Vice President Mike Pence while he and members of his family were inside the US Capitol when Trump-backed rioters stormed the halls of Congress on Wednesday, a source close to the vice president tells CNN. Several of the violent Trump supporters who were rampaging the US Capitol were heard screaming ‘where’s Mike Pence,’ the source said, frightening the vice president and his family.”
“People close to the vice president now believe he is being set up as a ‘scapegoat’ to shoulder the blame inside Trump-world after Pence refused to buckle to the President’s demands to engineer a procedural coup that would keep Trump in power,” Acosta’s report continues. “On Tuesday, Pence came under intense pressure from Trump to toss out the election results during a meeting that lasted hours in the Oval Office. The vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short, was banned by Trump from entering the West Wing, the source said, as the President repeatedly warned with ‘thinly veiled threats’ to Pence that he would suffer major political consequences if he refused to cooperate.”
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“The events Wednesday have left some aides to the vice president feeling Pence was betrayed by Trump as well as White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and the President’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani,” the CNN White House correspondent added.
Acosta claims one anonymous source told him, “Rudy, Meadows, and their teams have been trying to set up the vice president to take the fall as opposed to admitting they laid out false hope in all of this. Trump just can’t admit defeat and wants a scapegoat.”
The full report is available here:
Source close to the VP says Trump pressured Pence to engineer a coup, then put the VP and his family in danger. https://t.co/nCzD20UuQZ
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 7, 2021
