Washington CNN —

The day after former President Donald Trump was indicted over his efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump repeated a lie that the indictment depicts as central to his attempt to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

Trump posted on social media on Wednesday that he felt badly for former Vice President Mike Pence because of what Trump described as a flailing Pence campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Trump suggested Pence was struggling because “he didn’t fight against Election Fraud.” Trump then added: “The V.P. had power that Mike didn’t understand, but after the Election, the RINOS [Republicans in Name Only] & Dems changed the law, taking that power away!”

Facts First: The final sentence of Trump’s post includes two false claims. First, his claim that Pence “didn’t understand” the power he had as vice president is not true; Pence was entirely correct when he repeatedly told Trump in late 2020 and the first days of 2021 that the vice president did not have the authority to reject Biden’s electoral votes on January 6, 2021 as Trump had demanded. Second, while it’s true that Congress passed a bipartisan law in 2022 that revised some vague and imprecise language from the 1880s law that had previously governed the electoral count, Trump was incorrect when he claimed this 2022 law took power “away” from Pence. Rather, experts say, the new law simply made more explicit something the old...

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