Trump lawyers expected to fight special counsel Pence subpoena

That's right, Yasmin. Garrett Haick was able to confirm that some lawyers for former President Trump are planning to fight the new special counsel. Remember, this is Jack Smith that we're talking about over at the Department of Justice, who is overseeing two investigations that are tied to the former president. We're talking about January 6th, the Capitol riot, those efforts by the former president to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. That's one track. And then there's a separate track that he's overseeing as well when it comes to Donald Trump's handling of classified information. Remember, he took those sensitive records with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office, and then the FBI had to recover many of them last August.

So two very different investigations. We understand through our reporting in the last couple of days that former Vice President Pence was subpoenaed in the matter specifically related to January 6th and the attack on the Capitol. And that that subpoena is now, we understand, according to this reporting from Garrett Haick, according to a source who is familiar with this legal strategy for Mr. Trump's team, that they are going to fight that on the grounds of executive privilege. And that is what we understand right now. Again, these discussions are ongoing. We don't have any formal response from the Trump campaign.

Of course, the former president declared he was going to make another run for the White House last November. So he's an active candidate for 2024. And then the actual attorneys who have been working for Mr. Trump have declined to comment so far at this point as well. But this was a huge sort of development yesterday when we learned about the subpoena. And then, of course, we reached out to the former president to see what his reaction would be to this. And, of course, the relationship between the two men became incredibly strained after January 6th, when, of course, many of those rioters who stormed the Capitol, who said they did so because the president at the time told them to do it.

Some of them were chanting, hang Mike Pence, of course, the former vice president, after that, breaking with his former boss to whom he had been incredibly loyal in the past. So this is just another chapter of this. But again, the special counsel investigation is something that is ongoing. We have no idea how long this is going to take. But this is just a new chapter in how a current candidate for 2024 is now dealing with another likely candidate for 2024, as many people expect Mike Pence to make his bid official in the coming weeks and months, Yasmin. Yeah. And I just want to mention that we're going to get into more of this with Barbara McQuaid as well, kind of talking through the legality issue with all this involved.

I mean, it's not surprising necessarily, right? Of course, this claim the Trump team is trying to make of executive privilege. It's something that we expected to happen. I'm just wondering, Monica, and if you talked about this, forgive me, as we're trying to kind of sift through the all of this stuff. But do we know if there's been any communication between the former vice president and his former boss because of now Trump's legal team getting involved? I don't believe we know the answer to that. I don't think that these two men have spoken in some time. I think our reporting recently showed that, again, this relationship really went into a new phase after January 6. And even though publicly they speak about each other all the time and even recently when it was discovered that the former vice president had classified material at his home in Indiana, the former president came out and sort of defended him in this respect.

But that's also a very complicated matter because, again, the former president's own mishandling of classified information is the subject of a special counsel investigation. So I don't believe the two of them are on very good speaking terms or chummy terms to use that. But we can expect, again, as many people do, Mr. Pence is going to jump into this 2024 race. So the two will cross paths again, of course, through the nature of that political campaign.

Yasmin Vossoughian