CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said Tuesday on CNN’s “This Morning” that former Vice President Mike Pence would be a “crucial” witness against former President Donald Trump.
Partial transcript as follows:
PHIL MATTINGLY: Elie, without getting into the comma, specifically, what does it tell you that Smith’s team is being that granular about their process here?
HONIG: Well, I feel this is what prosecutors do. Let’s remember, this trial is going to happen. It is under 100 days away from right now. Mike Pence is going to be a pivotal, perhaps the pivotal witness for the prosecutors. He has the sort of unique standing here where he’s both an eyewitness and a victim. He’s a victim in the sense that he was the recipient of Donald Trump’s pressure campaign. He was the one who the rioters were chanting for.
But he’s also a witness to crucial one-on-one conversations at times that he had with Donald Trump. And there’s no other person on the planet who can give prosecutors the kind of insight that Mike Pence can give them.I think the key reporting here is that Pence directly told Donald Trump he had seen no evidence of election fraud. Add Mike Pence to that long list that he did not believe he had the constitutional authority to throw out the vote. So Mike Pence is a crucial witness any way you cut this, and it makes sense to me the prosecutors are digging in at that level of granularity.
POPPY HARLOW: Can we just get into the commas for a moment, though, Elie, because you read it. “No, I don’t have the authority to change the outcome of the election on January 6th” or, you know, I don’t have the authority. I mean, that is a huge difference, is it not? What would it do for the prosecution? Pence is saying it’s the latter.
HONIG: Commas matter. Every word matters. Every piece of punctuation matters. Think about how that changes the meaning of the sentence.
On the one hand, it’s written with the comma, which would mean, you know, in the conversational sense. You know, sir, I don’t think I have the authority to do that without the comma, which Pence now says, the comma shouldn’t be there.
It means, you know, Donald Trump, you know that I don’t think I have the authority to throw out the election. So that comma, it may seem trivial, but it makes a big difference in the actual meaning of the sentence.
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