Former US Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday offered some of his strongest condemnation yet of former President Donald Trump's decisions around Jan. 6, a day after Trump was indicted over attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
"Sadly, the president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear," Pence told reporters in Indianapolis, according to ABC News. "And while I made my case to him, with what I understood my oath of the Constitution to require, the president ultimately continued to demand that I choose him over the Constitution."
"I really do believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be President of the United States," he continued. "And anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the Constitution should never be President of the United States again."
Pence also stressed that he "had hoped that this issue and the judgment of the president's actions that day would be left to the American people" rather than the legal system.
"Our founders had just won a war against a king, and the last thing they would have done was this unilateral authority and any one person to decide who would be the next president. I dismissed it out of hand," he said at the fair.
"So in this moment, irrespective of how this case plays out, I want the American people to know that I believe with all my heart, by God's grace, I did my duty on that day," Pence went on to say. "And as I stand for the Republican nomination for president, I want you to know ... I'll always stand on the Constitution of the United States. Our country is more important than any one man. Our Constitution is more important than any one man."
On Tuesday, after news of Trump’s indictment went public, the former Vice President said that it "serves as an important reminder: anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States."
Pence, who is running against Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has said in the past that Trump’s words on Jan. 6 were “reckless,” and that the former President continues to be wrong in his assertions about the 2020 election.