Scott J. Applewhite/AP
- Mike Pence accused the media of covering the January 6 insurrection to "demean" all Trump voters.
- "The media wants to distract from the Biden administration's failed agenda by focusing on one day in January," Pence told Fox News.
- The January 6 insurrection was waged by pro-Trump rioters targeting Congress and Pence personally.
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Former Vice President Mike Pence accused the media of covering the January 6 insurrection, a violent attack on Congress and on him personally, to "distract" from the Biden administration to "demean" all Trump voters.
"I know the media wants to distract from the Biden administration's failed agenda by focusing on one day in January, they want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believed we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020," Pence said in a Monday night interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity.
"For our part, I truly believe we ought to remain completely focused on the future and that's where I'm focused," Pence added, a potential nod to his 2024 presidential aspirations.
During the insurrection, rioters waged an attack on Congress and on Pence to try and stop them from counting President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College votes and affirming Trump's election loss, with some rioters chanting "hang Mike Pence!" after former President Donald Trump sent out numerous tweets attacking Pence.
-The Recount (@therecount) October 5, 2021
Reporting in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's book "Peril" reveals new details about how far Trump and his allies took their pressure campaign to get Pence to singularly try to overturn Biden's 306-232 Electoral College victory, which he does not have the power to do, and how seriously Pence considered some of their ploys.
The authors first reported on the existence of a memo from legal scholar John Eastman, obtained by Insider and other outlets, which outlined an outlandish ploy for Pence to throw out the prevailing laws governing the electoral counting process and try to install Trump in a second term.
Pence now has a difficult balance to strike between differentiating himself from Trump while not alienating Trump's supporters as he eyes a 2024 presidential run.
In September, for example, Pence told a Democratic undercover operative who posed as a Capitol rioter and secretly filmed the encounter, that he "loved her heart" after explaining why he couldn't reverse President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.
A House Select Committee is currently conducting a wide-ranging probe on the January 6 insurrection and the circumstances leading up to it, including the pressure efforts targeting Pence.
"It's an important part of the historical record to determine how close Trump actually came to achieving his scheme of getting Pence to declare unilateral power to reject electoral college votes," Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin recently told the Washington Post.