Former Vice President Mike Pence says it would have been "un-American" for him to overturn the 2020 election.
Former President Donald Trump, who has blamed voter fraud in several key battleground states for his loss to Joe Biden, had told supporters that Pence, in his role overseeing the certification of the Electoral College votes, "is going to have to come through for us" and change the outcome.
Pence, however, says he had no power to do so.
"The idea that any one person could choose the American president, I think, was actually un-American," the former vice president told Joel C. Rosenberg on TBN's "The Rosenberg Report."
"The presidency belongs to the American people and to the American people alone, and I was determined to fulfill my duty before the Congress of the United States to do just that."
Pence, who's promoting his book "So Help Me God," said "voting irregularities were real" in several states that changed election laws without going to their legislatures. However, he added that "widespread voter fraud would never emerge."
"Somewhere along the way, as those court decisions were being resolved, there emerged a theory, largely on the internet, that as vice president, in my role as the presiding officer at the joint session of Congress where the Electoral College votes are counted, that I possessed some unilateral authority to reject votes or return votes back to the states," Pence told Rosenberg.
"The president became surrounded by advisers who were telling him that I had the authority to overturn the election. But President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election."
Pence told Rosenberg that Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the attack at the Capitol, "became a triumph of freedom."
"Because as the world watched, we reconvened the Congress of the United States on the very same day and conducted the peaceful transfer of power under the Constitution of the United States," he said.
Rosenberg asked Pence about the former vice president's current relationship with Trump.
"The president and I found a way to part amicably, but in the days following our departure from office, I saw the president return to some of the same rhetoric that he was using in the lead-up to Jan. 6,” Pence said.
"I just thought it was best for us to go our separate ways, and we have."
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