Former Vice President Mike Pence called former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey after the 2020 election, but “there was no pressure,” he said in an interview that aired Sunday.
Pence’s comments followed a Washington Post report that former President Donald Trump urged Pence to call Ducey to urge him to find evidence that would help Trump overturn the state’s presidential results.
“I checked in, not just with Governor Ducey, but with other state governors who were going through the legal process of reviewing their election results, but there was no pressure,” Pence said during from an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation”. “
“After so much uncertainty about the outcome of the election in places like Arizona, in places like Georgia, states across the country were going through the legal process of engaging in a…review under state law,” Pence said. “I got updates on that, I passed them on, and it was nothing more or less than that.”
According to the Post’s report, Trump also called Ducey, urging the Republican governor to find enough fraudulent votes to help undo his narrow loss to Joe Biden in the state.
Since Ducey’s refusal to overturn the 2020 state election results, he’s been a political punching bag for Trump, who has called him a “RINO” — Republican in name only — and “l ‘one of the worst governors in America’. But Ducey, who has since left office after reaching his term limit, stood by his decision, saying he was “true to the Constitution and the law”.
Trump is under federal investigation into efforts he and his allies may have undertaken to attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. He is also under state investigation in Georgia into similar allegations; in a recording of a call to Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump can be heard asking Raffensperger to “find” more votes.