Mike Pence testifies before the Senate about Trump's plans to rig the 2020 election

The former Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, has been ordered by a federal judge to comply with a grand jury subpoena issued by the special counsel investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the loss of the 2020 presidential election that he suffered.

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Pence had previously declared that he would challenge the subpoena issued by special counsel Jack Smith on the grounds that, as president of the Senate, he is constitutionally protected from testifying about certain legislative activities involving his office.

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Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has ruled that Vice President Pence has some limited protections regarding his role in the White House. This is as of Jan. 6, 2021. There was a joint session of Congress that had convened on that day to confirm that President Joseph Biden had won the 2020 election over Donald Trump, under the leadership of the then-vice president.

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Nevertheless, Boasberg is reported to have ruled that Pence is not immune from having to testify about alleged "illegality" by the Trump administration.

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Trump's attorneys also failed to convince the judge that executive privilege protects them from subpoenas, according to a source familiar with the sealed ruling.

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Smith is looking into whether Trump or his loyalists improperly interfered with the transfer of power on or before January 6, 2021. This is when a mob of Trump's supporters stormed the US Capitol after hearing false reports of widespread election fraud.

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Pence, who was the vice president at the time, had been under pressure by Trump to reject key Electoral College votes for Biden during the congressional proceedings in the hopes that they would be sent back to states whose officials would then pick Trump as their winner. He refused, however, to cooperate with this plan, saying he did not have a constitutional right under the law to unilaterally throw out electoral votes on the morning of the event.

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Having made that decision, Trump and many of his supporters were infuriated and some of them broke through police lines, entering the Capitol and forcing Vice President Pence and members of Congress to flee for their lives.

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After the Capitol riots and in the years since, Vice President Mike Pence has repeatedly defended his decision, which could have put him against Trump in the Republican primary. Pence is rumored to run for the presidency in 2024.

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Trade Algo's comment request was not immediately answered by a spokesperson for Vice President Pence.

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A federal judge reportedly ordered several of Trump's former aides to testify before the grand jury taking evidence in Smith's investigation, according to reports from Trade Algo and other media sources days before the decision on Pence's testimony.

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On the grounds of executive privilege, Trump's legal team had also attempted to prevent those former aides from testifying.

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In addition, Smith is looking into the thousands of secret documents that were delivered to Trump's Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida, where he has been residing since leaving office. Earlier this year, the FBI searched Trump's house.

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In a statement to Trade Algo on Tuesday, a representative for the Trump campaign charged that the Justice Department had "continuously stepped far outside the standard norms in attempting to destroy the long accepted, long-held, Constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege."

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Trump is presently leading the GOP primary field for president, and the statement claimed that Trump's political rivals were "corrupting the legal process" to have an impact on the election.