Former President Trump called former Vice President Pence a “very honorable man” after Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed Pence as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and into Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office.
Donald Trump slams Mike Pence
Pence was subpoenaed by Smith after months of negotiations between Pence’s legal team and federal prosecutors.
“Mike Pence is an honorable man,” Trump told Fox News Digital on Friday in an exclusive interview, but he laid out a number of areas he hopes Smith will consider and look into as part of his investigation.
“Are they going to look for the people that spied on my campaign?” Trump asked, referring to the FBI’s original investigation into whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
It is noted that that investigation was taken over by then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller in 2017. After nearly two years, the investigation yielded no evidence of criminal conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election.
Special Counsel John Durham has been investigating the origins of that probe since 2019.
“Are they going to look at Special Agent Charles McGonigal who was in charge of the Russia probe and just arrested for taking large amounts of money from Russia?” Trump asked, referring to McGonigal, who was recently indicted on charges of money laundering and other counts stemming from his “collusion” with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
McGonigal, who was a former special agent in charge of the New York FBI Counterintelligence Division, was charged for working on behalf of and taking money from Deripaska, who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Deripaska was the same Russian oligarch who was working with Christopher Steele — the author of the infamous anti-Trump dossier that served as the basis for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
“Are they going to look into the FBI’s activities with Twitter and Facebook trying to rig the election?” Trump asked. “Are they going to look at the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop from hell, which would have made, according to pollsters, a 17-point difference in the election?” Trump added: “It was suppressed by the FBI in collusion with Twitter and with Facebook.”
Trump referred to the ways in which Big Tech suppressed stories related to Hunter Biden’s business dealings, based on emails and records contained in his now-infamous laptop, ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
At the time, the Biden campaign, Democrats, Biden allies and even dozens of former national security officials cast the laptop and stories about Hunter Biden’s business dealings as part of a Russian disinformation campaign to influence the 2020 election. At the time, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Wray and other top sitting intelligence community officials said that the laptop was not part of a Russian disinformation campaign, maintaining there was “no intelligence that supports that” theory.
