Former Vice President Mike Pence is returning to Iowa Wednesday for a three-city trip as he moves closer to making an announcement on his presidential run.
Pence is among at least four would-be GOP presidential contenders with plans to hit the Hawkeye State in the next few weeks. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), and Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy are also planning return trips to the first-in-the-nation caucus state next month.
Haley will be in Sioux City, Denison, Storm Lake, Fort Dodge, and Des Moines during an April 10-12 campaign swing. Scott plans to be in Iowa on April 12, and Ramaswamy is looking at a multi-day campaign trip beginning April 21, according to the campaign. Schedules are forthcoming.
Haley and Ramaswamy announced their campaigns in February; Scott, like Pence, continues to mull a run for the White House.
Pence’s first stop Wednesday is at a breakfast meeting beginning at 8:30 a.m. at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale. The former vice president will then travel to Cedar Rapids for a Linn Eagles Luncheon and Fireside Chat at 11 a.m. He’s also scheduled to attend the Johnson County Republican Party’s Reagan Dinner at 6:30 p.m. in Coralville.
Pence’s trip comes a day after Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled that the former vice president must testify before the politically driven January 6 Committee. The judge agreed with the special counsel investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Former President Donald Trump had asserted executive privilege in moving to block Pence from testifying,
“At the same time, the judge issued a ruling that narrowly upheld parts of a separate legal challenge brought by Pence’s attorneys, who have argued Pence should be exempt from providing records or answering certain questions that align with his duties as president of the Senate overseeing the formal certification of the election on Jan. 6, 2021,” ABC News reported Tuesday.
“The DOJ is continuously stepping far outside the standard norms in attempting to destroy the long accepted, long held, Constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege,” a Trump spokesperson said.
“There is no factual or legal basis or substance to any case against President Trump,” the statement added. “The deranged Democrats and their comrades in the mainstream media are corrupting the legal process and weaponizing the justice system in order to manipulate and influence an election in which President Trump is dominating all across the board.”
National polls show Trump leading Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest presumptive GOP presidential nomination rival, by a wide margin, with Pence, Haley and Scott lagging far behind. Polls conducted by Public Opinion Strategies (POS) and provided exclusively to Axios this week show DeSantis out in front of Trump by 8 points (45 percent to 37 percent) in a head-to-head match-up in Iowa, and tied with Trump (39 percent to 39 percent) in New Hampshire. As The Star News Network first reported, POS did not include basic polling data with the release, raising questions about the polls’ validity.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Mike Pence” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Background Photo “Iowa Capitol” by Billwhittaker. CC BY-SA 3.0.
