Pence blames 'crackpot lawyers' for convincing Trump to try to overturn 2020 election

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday blamed a cabal of erratic lawyers for convincing former President Donald Trump to challenge the 2020 election results.

Speaking one day after special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in his Jan. 6 probe, Pence told supporters that "[s]adly, the president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear," The Hill reported.

He further reiterated his own claims that the vice president lacked authority to disqualify electoral votes or kick the results back to the state legislatures for review.

"You know, I’m a student of American history. And the first time I heard in early December somebody suggest that as vice president I might be able to decide which votes to reject and which to accept, I knew that it was false … I dismissed it out of hand," he said.

"For my part, I want people to know that I had no right to overturn the election and that what the president maintained that day, and frankly has said over and over again over the last two and a half years, is completely false... And it’s contrary to what our Constitution and the laws of this country provide," he concluded.

Pence is running against Trump for the Republican nomination and currently stands in fourth place behind his former running mate, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, and tech mogul Vivek Ramaswamy.