Rachel Maddow took apart Vice President Mike Pence’s lies about Mike Flynn and showed why the VP is facing his own Russia problems.
Maddow said:
The person whose role in all of this is perhaps most implausible and therefore most troubling is actually the vice president, Mr. Roboto, Mike Pence. While over half the officials in the administration were overtly talking about Flynn’s discussions about sanctions, Mike Pence, the head of the transition said he knew nothing about that, never heard any of that, no idea. When another controversy about Flynn arose and Flynn had to retroactively register as a foreign agent who had been secretly working for Turkey during the presidential campaign, Flynn’s lawyers said they notified the transition multiple times, including in writing about Flynn’s ties to that foreign government as well. Again, Mike Pence was the head of the transition, which was the entity which was notified about Flynn’s foreign ties. But Mike Pence said had no idea about that. Never heard about it. You are running the transition and it turns out the national security adviser, the incoming national security adviser had secret undisclosed foreign ties that he is under federal investigation for? That doesn’t rise to your level? What else were you busy with?
Similarly, Mike Pence publicly denied that there had ever been any role in the transition for Mike Flynn’s son, Mike Jr. After one of many instances in which Mike Jr. Achieved press attention and some notoriety for controversial public statements. Mike Pence was running the transition. He said overtly that Mike Flynn’s son never had any role in the transition, but in fact he had. Some of the stuff he later got in trouble for were messages he sent from his official transition e-mail address. Vice president Pence trying to preserve some sort of deniable fiction about that was just inexplicable and embarrassing at the time, but it’s ended up being just one of a whole bunch of things that the vice president has said specifically about Mike Flynn that turned out to be utterly implausible or just flat-out false.
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Rachel Maddow then closed by asking the big question. Why did Mike Pence tell so many lies about the role of Mike Flynn?
Maddow has been locked in on Pence since the scandal broke. Mike Pence’s strategy appears to be to fly below the radar, wait for Trump to crash and burn, and then become president. The problem is that Mike Pence has a whole of questions to answer on the Russia scandal himself. It strains common sense that the vice president was as clueless as he pretends to be.
Pence was always the Republican Party’s back up plan if corrupt Trump went down in a ball of flames. The problem is that beneath Pence’s facade of evangelical Christianity is enough corruption to take him down with Trump.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
