It has been over a year since January 6th.
Over a year since the multipronged effort to overthrow the results of the election.
With one big part of that being the pressure campaign to get Mike Pence to do
what he has absolutely no authority to do,
which is unilaterally decide that Donald Trump gets to be president.
That is a claim that Donald Trump has been making up until like this week.
And finally, 13 months later,
Mike Pence is finally weighing in on it in this video.
>> There are those in our party who believe that,
as the presiding officer over the joint session of congress,
that I possess unilateral authority to reject electoral college votes.
And I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to overturn
the election.
President Trump is wrong.
I had no right to overturn the election.
The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.
And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one
person could choose the American president.
Under the constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election.
>> Okay, so everything that Mike Pence said there was factually accurate.
Also accurate to say that he is saying it way after.
Maybe he might've had an effect.
Maybe he never would've at all.
But that video has generated so much attention and so much applause for
Mike Pence.
He's the best.
He's the sexiest man in America.
He's doing such good things, defender of democracy.
Maybe he should be the next Democratic presidential nominee.
What do you think, Cenk?
What do you think?
>> Okay, but look, so credit where credit is due.
So number one, I'm thrilled that he's saying it.
Finally, finally, finally, he said it.
Number two, he should've said it on January 6th, let alone 7th.
They tried to murder him.
The chant was hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.
And it took him over a year to gather up the courage to say the most
obvious thing in the world when Trump supporters were looking
to execute him for not overturning a democratic election.
So now the most important question is why is he saying it now?
If he was too scared to say it for over a year, what changed?
Well, what changed is what we told you guys approximately a month ago.
And longtime TYT viewers, not even long time.
You can see it every day, right?
But you saw us telling you that hey, the Republicans are turning.
The donors must have turned because it is now systematically people are going and
saying, Trump is wrong.
Trump is wrong.
We showed you first the standard politicians, Kissinger, Cheney etc.
That already was baked in.
They were already on that side, so that's not interesting news.
But then people that were not die-hard Trump people, but
very conservative, politicians started saying it was like, wait a minute.
And then I said, once we got two or three people saying, I was like, that's it.
The memo went out.
And the memo goes out from literally places like the Chamber of Commerce.
And they tell people.
Sometimes they say, you now have permission to say this and
other times it'll say you must say this, right?
And then when I saw Brian Kilmeade and a couple other Fox News contributors do it,
I was like that's it.
There's no question, there's no question.
In fact, we predicted that Fox would say even before Kilmeade said it.
So I wouldn't say that it's the culmination but it's getting there.
For Pence to now come out and
say yes, the vice president cannot unilaterally overturn an election.
To us, it's literally the most obvious thing we've ever heard.
We didn't all go vote and then go hey,
I wonder what the vice president's gonna say, right?
And as I've said 100 times and I haven't heard anyone else say it,
even though again, the most obvious thing in the world.
If that theory was true, then good news.
You don't have to bother voting in 2024 cuz Kamala Harris is gonna decide
the election.
Do republicans want that?
Hell no, right?
So this is more important than just Pence saying something a year too late.
This is some Grand Poobahs in the Republican Party saying no,
we're gonna take on Trump full board.
And we're gonna stop being scared. And Mitch McConnell also piled on today,
so there's no question.
It's a coordinated effort.
>> And I agree with you.
Initially, I went into this thinking that it was because mother finally gave Pence
her approval.
But I'm really glad that he got there.
And also to even just from a humanistic stand standpoint, I could imagine
that Pence was probably somewhat relieved to finally be able to say this.
In part because having Trump to reignite these claims so recently.
I'm sure things have finally somewhat settled for Pence in terms of, I'm sure,
the threats to his life and all sorts of things, and attacks on his family.
So to have that reignited and
to finally be able to say something probably felt pretty good.
But at the end of the day, the Republicans,
they're always the last minute.
Let me make sure that this suits my own needs and my own agenda first.
So I am surprised, I am grateful, but I am still annoyed.
>> Yeah, I gotta say one last thing about Pence.
So the fact that he couldn't even condemn his own attempted
execution shows incredible cowardice.
And here he didn't get permission for mother.
My guess is he got permission from the Republican donors.
But having said all that, if he had gone along with Trump, Giuliani,
Bannon Navarro's plan, we would've had an unbelievable mess.
And then they called it the Green Bay Sweep.
They named it.
It was a plan.
There's no question about it.
It was an attempted coup.
They said all that Pence has to do, even though it doesn't have any effect in law,
is to say I'm sending it back to the states.
I am not certifying this election,
and then we will pretend that our fake collectors.
And literally, they had people signed fake documents saying that they were elected
when they were not electors in the swing states.
We will then seat the fake electors.
And so if Pence had gone along with the ruse, they would've done that plan.
And then the military would've had to have decided who's the real president.
And the fact that Pence avoided that is a testament to him.
So we have to be fair.
On that day, he did have strength and courage.
He lost it for a year [LAUGH] and now he's regained it with the help of donors etc,
right?
But this is the establishment striking back.
But in a crazy twist of fate in a positive way.
So probably the only positive thing the establishment's ever done.
>> Exactly.
Yeah, and because of that, he is an honorary member of the Dragon Squad.
I'm kidding.
He's not. >> I wouldn't go that far [LAUGH].
>> Hopefully now, can we all dispense with the idea that he's the most powerful
person, that the VP is the most powerful person in Washington?
They're not. It's the Senate parliamentarian.
Everybody should know that by now.
>> [LAUGH] >> People never took a government class.