Mike Pence changes his tune on whether he would pardon Trump

Former Vice President Mike Pence is now taking a more vocal stand to defend his former boss, even as the ex-president continues to belittle and dismiss his former running-mate’s bid for the GOP nomination – and runs for it himself.

Mr Pence was speaking in Sioux City, Iowa, on Wednesday when he addressed the issue of pardoning Donald Trump — a question he had been outright avoiding for weeks.

The ex-vice president said that he would consider pardoning Mr Trump if his former boss was found guilty of a crime at the federal level, while admonishing other Republican rivals for statements he characterised as assumptions that Mr Trump would be found guilty.

"I’ve been a governor, I’ve actually pardoned people," said Mr Pence, according to the Des Moines Register. "And I think any pardon that you could conduct would only be appropriate to consider after somebody has been found guilty. And I don’t know why some of my competitors in the Republican primary assume the president’s going to be found guilty."

He also pledged to address GOP voters’ demands for firings at the Justice Department, a fixation that has emerged as Republicans have accused the agency (without evidence) of being politicised against the GOP and Mr Trump specifically. The former president faces 37 charges at the federal level stemming from his retention of classified defence materials and other records at Mar-a-Lago. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Independent has separately reported that the DoJ is considering a superseding indictment with more charges for Mr Trump and his inner circle stemming from the January 6 attack and the campaign to alter the lawful result of the 2020 presidential election.

"The American people have lost confidence in the Justice Department and on Day 1 if I’m president of the United States, we’re going to clean house of all the senior leadership at the Justice Department," Mr Pence reportedly said. "We’re going to put men and women in all the positions of authority, whether it’s attorney general, whether its director of the FBI, who are respected by people on both sides of the aisle for their integrity and their commitment to the rule of law."

They were statements that confirmed the vice president’s spot firmly in the narrow lane he has constructed for himself within the GOP primary field. Running for the presidency against the man who is accused by many of riling up the massive crowd that attacked the Capitol and endangered Mr Pence’s life on January 6, the ex-vice president has been careful to describe Mr Trump’s actions on that day as wrong while firmly refusing to state that anything Mr Trump did either relating to January 6 or his efforts to alter the results of the 2020 election rose to the level of criminal activity.

All in all, it amounts to a play for Mr Trump’s support base over Republicans who are more critical of the ex-president or simply feel like the party needs to move on. But it’s unclear how successful that gambit will be, given that Mr Trump himself remains the frontrunner for the nomination. Ironically, the most likely scenario for a shakeup of the field significant enough to boost Mr Pence to a competitive level would be the departure of Mr Trump from the contest, due to his increasing legal woes.

Mr Pence is currently polling in the mid to low single digits in most available GOP primary surveys, and his biggest hurdle remains the residual skepticism that many Trump voters feel towards him after his refusal to participate in Mr Trump’s scheme to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory on January 6 — the very reason Trump supporters attacked the Capitol.

On Wednesday, he was confronted on that issue by a Trump supporter who demanded to know why he hadn’t attempted to use his power as vice president to demand that the Senate halt the certification process, a move that Mr Pence has repeatedly affirmed that the Constitution would not have allowed him to do.

“Do you ever second-guess yourself? That was a constitutional right that you had to send those votes back to the states,” a woman told the former vice president at a pizza restaurant Wednesday evening, according to NBC News.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but that’s actually what the Constitution says,” Mr Pence responds in the NBC video. “No vice president in American history ever asserted the authority that you have been convinced that I had. But I want to tell you, with all due respect … President Trump was wrong about my authority that day, and he’s still wrong.”