Fact check: The day after his indictment, Trump lies again about Pence's powers on January 6

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 law had expressed less clearly: the vice president has only a ceremonial role in Congress' electoral count session and cannot unilaterally decide which electoral votes to accept or reject.

Trump was also wrong when he insinuated in the Wednesday post that Pence's refusal to reject electoral votes on January 6, 2021, amounted to a surrender to "Election Fraud." As the indictment notes, even Trump's own senior governmental appointees and campaign officials had found there was no fraud sufficient to have changed the outcome of the election in any state.

Pence's campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Before Trump's post on Wednesday, though, Pence told reporters at the Indiana State Fair: "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 added, "Sadly, the president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear."

The post on Wednesday was not the first time Trump had claimed that the existence of a congressional effort in 2022 to clarify the 19th-century Electoral Count Act proves that Pence did have the power in 2021 to reject Biden electors.

In reality, Pence is right that he never had that power. Three experts in election law told CNN that Trump was wrong, again, in his Wednesday post.