South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a best contender to be former President Donald Trump’s operating mate, refused to say all the way through a contemporary interview whether former Vice President Mike Pence acted accurately when he qualified the 2020 presidential election.
Noem used to be requested whether she thinks Pence did the right thing by overseeing the certification procedure in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, when he rebuffed force from Trump to reject the results.
“That situation will never happen again, because the law has been changed. So I don’t answer hypothetical questions,” Noem stated on NewsCountry’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”
“Looking back that day, I wasn’t in the situation. I wasn’t — didn’t have the information he had,” she stated in Monday’s interview, doubling down on a equivalent reaction she gave to CNN when she additionally stated Pence has “failed Donald Trump since that day.”
A spokesperson for Noem did now not in an instant reply to a request for remark Wednesday night.
Noem’s feedback this week about Pence come amid a coarse stretch for the second-term governor as she promotes her new guide “No Going Back,” a mixture of autobiographical main points and coverage proposals.
Noem has confronted bipartisan backlash over sure passages in the guide, together with one the place she describes killing her younger canine, and every other the place she stated she met with North Korean chief Kim Jong Un.
On Monday, Noem stated that the anecdote about Kim shouldn’t have gave the impression in the guide, although she’s refused to say in interviews whether she met with him. Her writer showed this week that the passage could be got rid of.
During the identical interview, Noem additionally criticized Pence for now not backing Trump in the 2024 election.
“I wish Mike Pence would endorse President Trump. That’s what’s frustrating for me right now,” she stated.
Pence, who dropped out of the GOP number one in October, stated in March that he would now not endorse Trump. He instructed Fox News at the time that “there were profound differences between me and President Trump on a range of issues, and not just our difference on my constitutional duties that I exercised on January 6th.”
