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Former US Vice President Mike Pence launched harsh criticism on Saturday against former President Donald Trump’s actions and role in storming the Capitol in 2021.
“His reckless statements put my family at risk,” Pence said.
Mike Pence spoke on Saturday at the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington. The dinner is attended by journalists and politicians and the tone is usually jocular. But Pence took the opportunity to use his speaking time to publicly criticize his former boss Donald Trump in the harshest way yet.
– President Trump was wrong. I did not have the authority to annul the election results. And his reckless statements put my family and everyone in the Capitol every day in danger, Mike Pence said of what happened on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building.
After the 2020 election loss, Trump publicly pressured Pence to annul the election results, but the vice president resisted the demand. During the storming, Pence had to be taken to safety with his staff and family, while people in the crowd chanted “hang Mike Pence!”.
Pence has condemned Trump’s actions in the storming and called it “reckless”.
But at the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday, Pence took a little more into account when commenting on the storming.
– There is no doubt that what happened that day was a shame. And it’s an affront to all decency to say it was anything else, Mike Pence said.
Facts
The Congress storm
On January 6, 2021, the members of the United States Congress gathered in the Capitol to count the electoral votes of the presidential election and formally appoint Democrat Joe Biden as the winner and next president.
At the same time, tens of thousands of supporters of Donald Trump had gathered in the capital Washington DC for a political mass meeting on the theme “Save America”. At the meeting, Trump repeated his false claims of systematic voter fraud and claimed he was the real winner. He urged his supporters to go to Congress: “If you don’t get the hell out of you, you won’t have a country anymore,” said the then-president.
Parts of the crowd did as he said. The protests turned violent when hundreds of people stormed the congress building and clashed with police. Some made it as far as Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and into one of the chambers. Parts of the building were vandalized.
Five people, including a policeman, lost their lives in connection with the attack.
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