Pence: 'Don't Recall' If WH Told About Electors

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Sunday he does not recall if White House officials had told him whether there were other electors to consider while certifying the 2020 election, but he did ask the Senate parliamentarian about the matter after hearing about alternate electors in the press and hearing rumors about them.

"I did ask the parliamentarian very directly," Pence, now a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, told NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd. "I asked her because I was hearing rumors. I was reading in the newspaper that there were alternate electors. I just — I asked her point blank."

And when Todd asked him again if anyone in the White House was telling him about the electors, Pence replied, "I don't recall that, I just remember hearing it in the public."

"I wanted a definitive answer whether or not the parliamentarian had received any additional electoral votes. She had not," he added. "So as you know, I — we actually changed the language as those Electoral College votes were recorded."

Pence said he spoke with the parliamentarian three days before the Jan. 6 certification and the protests at the Capitol.

Meanwhile, he told Todd that he had "no right to overturn the election."

"The Constitution is quite clear," he said. "As vice president, my job was to preside over a joint session of Congress, where the Constitution says the Electoral College votes shall be opened and shall be counted. And I know by God's grace I did my duty that day."

Former President Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty in a four-count indictment filed in Washington, D.C., over his actions after the 2020 presidential election. The indictment, brought through an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith, alleges the former president led a campaign of "dishonesty, fraud, and conceit" and includes details of Pence's conversations with Trump in the days leading up to Jan. 6.

Trump has denied Pence's claims that he told his vice president that he was "too honest," but Pence Sunday said that the conversation was "part of a dialogue that happened between the president and me and that was related, I think, to a bogus of a lawsuit that was brought to try and force my hand to have a federal judge say that I had the right to throw out votes."

But, he told Todd, "there's almost no idea more un-American than the idea that any one person could choose which votes to count for president of the United States."

Meanwhile, Trump, last week said he never asked Pence to disregard the Constitution, and Pence told Todd that he can "check his tweets."

"The president was quite clear and quite public that he thought that I had the authority to either reject or return votes to the states," said Pence. "The Constitution and the laws of this country gave us absolutely no basis [for that]."

Pence also criticized Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, about his actions in the White House leading up to the Jan. 6 protests.

"The chief of staff's supposed to be a gatekeeper," he said. "You're supposed to make sure the people that are getting into the Oval Office have the credibility to be there. And, frankly, this group of lawyers that were allowed to counsel the president and tell him what his itching ears longed to hear, that I had some right to reject votes or return votes to the states, there was no basis in that in history."

And when asked if he considers himself a "MAGA Republican," Pence responded that he's "incredibly proud" of the achievements of the Trump-Pence White House.

"In those four years, after eight years of the slowest recovery since the Great Depression, eight years under Barack Obama and Joe Biden that saw military cuts that hollowed out our military, eight years of liberals on our courts, under the Trump-Pence administration, with the support of MAGA Americans, we literally did make America great again," said Pence.

He said: "I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican in that order. I've always said that. People who know me know those are my values. Those are my ideals. And I really believe that the agenda that I've always been about, that I'm looking forward to taking to that debate stage, is the agenda that will bring this country all the way back."