Mike Pence was Vice President during Trump’s first term and was evacuated from Congress on January 6, 2021.
Former Vice President of the United StatesMike Pence, has voiced sharp criticism of a tax-funded fund aimed at compensating people who have felt persecuted by the US government.
This is what Mike Pence says to the media NBC.
Pence, who was current President Donald Trump’s first vice president from 2017 to 2021, says the fund was a bad idea from the start and believes it should be scrapped.
– I mean, it’s deeply offensive to me that you can have a fund that can even possibly compensate people who assaulted police officers or vandalized the Capitol on January 6th.
– I think this is an attitude that is widely shared by most Republicans and most Americans, he says to NBC.
The Trump administration unveiled the creation of the fund in May as part of a settlement to drop a lawsuit brought by Trump against the US Treasury and the IRS.
Many Trump supporters who were sued as a result of the January 6, 2021 storming of Congress have said they plan to seek compensation from the foundation.
The fund is worth 1.776 billion dollars. It is a symbolic reference to the year 1776, when the United States got its constitution. The amount corresponds to DKK 11.4 billion.
A judge last week temporarily blocked the fund.
Pence was in the US Congress building during the episode, where he was evacuated from the scene.
Upon entering his second term, Trump pardoned about 1,500 people who, according to police, had committed illegal acts that day.
The media BBC writes that the acting Minister of Justice, Todd Blanche, has sent a memo to skeptical Republican senators.
Here he justifies the high amount by saying that “literally tens of thousands of Americans were the objects of inappropriate and illegal attacks by the government”.
The foundation has faced criticism from both Democrats and Republicans.
The Republican leader in the Senate, John Thune, has said, according to the BBC, that he is not a “big fan” and that he sees no purpose for the fund.
Mitch McConnell, who was the Republican leader of the Senate from 2015 to 2021, has called it “absolutely foolish”.
Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Pennsylvania, has stated that he plans to introduce legislation that would effectively scrap the fund.
Other Republicans, however, support the idea.
Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama claims that hundreds of “innocent patriotic Americans have been behind bars for the past five years because of this fabricated witch hunt”.
/ritzau/
