Last Updated on January 12, 2021
A new report from the left-wing New York Times quotes President Donald Trump as having told Vice President Mike Pence that the latter would either go down in history as a “patriot” or as a “pussy,” prior to Pence’s decisions to certify votes from states with disputed elections and conspire with Congressional leadership to deploy the National Guard against Trump supporters without consulting the President.
The exchange reportedly happened last Wednesday as the Vice President was preparing to travel to the Capitol to ignore widespread evidence of election irregularities and certify the electoral vote for Joe Biden.
“You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy,” President Trump reportedly told Pence via telephone.
As National File reported earlier this year, there is evidence that Pence plotted to betray Trump as early as 2016, before the pair were even elected to office.
Constitutional lawyer Ivan Raiklin told National File over the weekend that he believes Pence violated the Constitution in certifying the electoral vote for Biden:
He also said that Vice President Pence violated the Constitution on December 23, by not sending a letter to those states, demanding that they correct the fraud. As National File reported, US Code actually prohibited Pence from accepting electoral votes from fraudulently certified states. Additionally, Raiklin said that Pence violated the Constitution a second time on January 6 by “not setting up an environment to correct the fraudulently certified electoral slates from these six contested states.”
“The United States Congress yesterday, facilitated the violation of all those parts of Constitution and in addition to that, they violated the 5th amendment, the Due Process clause, because the 5th amendment applies to the federal government. I’d argue that they also violated the 12th amendment, the manor that they voted in the House on the objections,” said Raiklin.
Though the reporting from the Times does seem to match up with other reports describing the relationship between Trump and Pence, it should be noted that the article goes on to make several dubious claims, such as former AG Jeff Sessions being “tortured by the president before being fired.”
There is no evidence at present that President Trump enacted any form of “torture” on Sessions that meets the Merriam-Webster definition of the term, which is “the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.”
