Mike Pence says Trump could be found INNOCENT, but former VP won’t pardon him

Presidential candidate Mike Pence would not say whether he will pardon Donald Trump, claiming the former president could still be found innocent in his federal charges.

Trump’s former VP shared with NBC host Chuck Todd that he hoped Trump would accept the results of the 2020 election by now.

Pence is now running against his former boss in the 2024 primary — and argued that Trump is not the same leader as when they ran together in 2016.

With Trump getting a federal indictment earlier this month with 37 separate counts, the overcrowded GOP primary field is being asked to weigh in on the case.

“Well, let me first of all say that I don’t know why some of my competitors in the Republican primaries assume the president will be found guilty,” Pence told NBC’s Meet the Press.

“Look, we only know what the president is accused of in the indictment,” he continued. “We don’t know what his defense is. We don’t know if this will even make it to court. It may be the subject of a cancellation request. We don’t know what the jury’s verdict will be.’

Meanwhile, long-running Republican presidential nominee and self-made biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy has already said he would pardon Trump if he becomes the CEO.

Contender and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who operates on an anti-Trump platform, called Ramaswamy’s efforts “offensive” and “pathetic.”

However, Pence says the pardon question is “premature.”

“I just think this whole thing is incredibly divisive in the country. And look, at the end of the day, I just think it makes me sad that we’re in this moment right now,” Pence told Todd.

In his bid to take the nomination from Trump, Pence made the argument that Trump has strayed from his 2016 positions, which were more conservative.

Pence vowed to fix that in the White House.

There are already 13 people running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Trump is way ahead of the field in early polls, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is in second place — usually trailing the ex-president by about 20 percentage points.

The former vice president also commented on the 2020 election, which Trump still insists was stolen in a massive voter fraud. Todd asked Pence if he would run now if Trump accepted the results of the last presidential election.

Pence is running against his former boss in the 2024 Republican primary, saying he ‘hoped’ Trump would ‘get by’ in the 2020 election result and argued he has strayed from conservative principles

“I always hoped he’d bring up this issue,” Pence replied. “Because I believe that no one who puts himself above the Constitution should ever be president of the United States.”

“And I had hoped that President Trump would eventually see that he had been misled by the so-called legal experts who had misadvised him about the role he thought I had, and still thinks I had that day,” said the ex- said VP.

Trump insisted that Pence had the ability to stop Congress from certifying the election results and thereby somehow nullify the people’s will to vote in Joe Biden as the next president.

When rioters stormed the capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling for Pence to be hanged, Trump did not speak out in defense of his No. 2 — and has, in fact, begun attacking him along the campaign trail as one of the main reasons he is still no president today.