South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a top contender to be former President Donald Trump’s running mate, refused to say during a recent interview whether former Vice President Mike Pence acted appropriately when he certified the 2020 presidential election.
Noem was asked whether she thinks Pence did the right thing by overseeing the certification process in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, when he rebuffed pressure 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 said on NewsNation’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 said in Monday’s interview, doubling down on a similar response she gave to CNN when she also said Pence has “failed Donald Trump since that day.”
A spokesperson for Noem did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.
Noem’s comments this week about Pence come amid a rough stretch for the second-term governor as she promotes her new book “No Going Back,” a mix of autobiographical details and policy proposals.
Noem has faced bipartisan backlash over certain passages in the book, including one where she describes killing her young dog, and another where she said she met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
On Monday, Noem said that the anecdote about Kim shouldn’t have appeared in the book, though she’s refused to say in interviews whether she met with him. Her publisher confirmed this week that the passage would be removed.
During the same interview, Noem also criticized Pence for 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 said.
Pence, who dropped out of the GOP primary in October, said in March that he would not endorse Trump. He told 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.”
