Despite having broken with former President Donald Trump at times since the rocky end to their administration, former Vice President Mike Pence was unequivocal in his defense of Trump in the face of an "unprecedented indictment."
"The unprecedented indictment of a former president of the United States on a campaign finance issue is an outrage," Pence told CNN on Thursday night in a previously scheduled interview.
"And it appears to — for millions of Americans — to be nothing more than a political prosecution that's driven by a prosecutor, who literally ran for office, on the pledge, to indict the former president."
Pence denounced the low threshold that has long had criticized the grand jury system: "remember the old saying, you can indict a ham sandwich."
"The threshold, the burden of proof is very low," Pence continued. "Prosecutors make decisions, discretionary decisions, about what they bring, all the time.
"Federal prosecutors passed on this. The Manhattan DA initially delayed it, passed on it."
Pence defended Trump against the "get Trump" Democrat political campaigns of both Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
"But when you have an Attorney General in New York, and a Manhattan DA that targeted one particular American, in their campaigns, I think that offends the notion, of the overwhelming majority, of the American people, who believe in fairness, who believe in equal treatment, before the law," Pence said.
"This appears to be just one more example," he continued, "of the kind of two-tiered justice system that the American people have had enough of."
Pence said Trump's issues will have no impact on his decision whether to run for president – which he told Newsmax this week he expects to announce this spring. The case against Trump remains weak anyway, and it might even ignite Trump's base, he suggested.
"It's a possibility that a judge would even throw this case out before it would even go to trial," Pence said.
"This is a bad decision, by a political prosecutor, and I think the American people are going to see right through it."