Former Vice President Mike Pence apparently didn’t want to give his one-time boss, Donald Trump, any more attention. So, he canceled a planned interview with Fox News late last week.
Pence, who is running for president in 2024, was scheduled to be interviewed by Sean Hannity on Fox News Thursday night, with his upcoming GOP campaign the obvious topic of discussion. Yet, after Trump was indicted on federal charges earlier that day, the former vice president decided to pull out of the interview at the last minute.
Initially, MSNBC said that Fox News and the Pence camp “mutually” came to the conclusion to cancel the scheduled interview. Sources told media outlet Mediaite, though, that only 30 minutes before the interview was scheduled to start, Pence’s campaign nixed the interview because the former vice president didn’t want to talk about the federal indictment.
As the source said:
“Pence’s team canceled the interview at 8:30 p.m. because they did not want to answer questions about the indictment. He was scheduled to talk about his presidential run. We said we couldn’t not ask about the indictment. It was not a mutual decision to cancel.”
It seems as though the Pence team – without much time to really craft their position on the indictment – didn’t want to be forced to answer questions on something that, as the source said, Hannity had to ask him. Running from the problem isn’t going to make it go away, of course, and if Pence wants to become a presidential candidate, he’s going to have to answer questions about Trump at some point.
Turns out that the Pence campaign may have just wanted to control the narrative and not be put on the spot only a few hours after news broke about the indictment.
On Friday morning, the former vice president did issue what ended up being a “par for the course” response while appearing on a radio show with Hugh Hewitt. On that show, Pence said of the Trump indictment:
“Well, I think it’s important to know that we don’t know the facts in this case. No one does. … My only hope is, as we learn about the facts of this indictment next week, that the American people will see that in this case, it would meet a high standard necessary to justify the unprecedented federal indictment of a former president of the United States by the current president of the United States Justice Department, and by a potential rival.”
Later in the day, Pence came out and said that Merrick Garland, the attorney general leading the case against Trump, should unseal the indictment so that everyone could see what was in it.
Despite the fact that there is a big divide between him and Trump, Pence has consistently supported his former boss in the matter of the classified documents, and the fact that he believes much of this action has been politically motivated. That’s why he plans to “clean house” of many federal agencies if he were to be elected in 2024.
