If there was any doubt that Mike Pence intends to toss his hat into the ring as a presidential candidate, his string of interviews promoting his new memoir should tell you all you need to know. He’s running and he has a few things to get off his chest. It’s unclear when an official declaration of his candidacy will come, but don’t be surprised when it does.

Pence went on the record Wednesday with CBS’s Margaret Brennan that he will not testify before the January 6 committee and the committee doesn’t have a right to his testimony. He cited the separation of powers. He blasted the committee for its partisan nature, too, which can’t be overstated. Pence is “closing the door” on the question of whether or not he will testify.

“I am closing the door on that,” Pence told Brennan of testifying before the panel.

“But I must say again, the partisan nature of the January 6 committee has been a disappointment to me,” he added. “It seemed to me in the beginning, there was an opportunity to examine every aspect of what happened on January 6, and to do so more in the spirit of the 9/11 Commission, nonpartisan, nonpolitical, and that was an opportunity lost.”

“I never stood in the way of senior members of my team cooperating with the committee and testifying,” Pence told Brennan. Multiple Pence aides, including his former chief of staff Marc Short and legal counsel Greg Jacob, have testified before the panel.

“But Congress has no right to my testimony,” Pence told CBS. “We have a separation of powers under the Constitution of the United States. And I believe it would establish a terrible precedent for the Congress to summon a vice president of the United States to speak about deliberations that took place at the White House.”

BREAKING: Former Vice President Mike Pence tells CBS News that he's "closing the door" on testifying before the Jan. 6 committee. “Congress has no right to my testimony,” he tells @margbrennan. pic.twitter.com/E5IVtwrscY

— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 16, 2022

Good for Pence for stating the obvious. The purpose of the January 6 committee was to ding up Trump enough so that he would not run for president again in 2024. That was always delusional, of course, because there was never really any doubt that Trump would run again. His ego demands it. Pence, on the other hand, has not been so obvious about a desire to be president until now. Pelosi set up the committee so that Republican leadership didn’t get to choose their own participants and eventually the only two Republicans she allowed on the committee were her useful idiots, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

Pence always comes off as a mild-mannered kind of guy, in my opinion, but don’t forget that he has been a career politician. He knows what he is doing. He has slowly come out as a critic of Trump’s actions on January 6 and now he is dismissing the January 6 committee as a partisan exercise at the hands of Nancy Pelosi. He’s ok with his former staffers testifying before the committee but he’ll take a pass.

So, after the CBS interview, the chair and vice-chair of the January 6 committee responded to Pence’s criticism. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) claim the hearings were not partisan, but that “it was truthful.” Uh-huh. Liz Cheney’s own constituents in Wyoming were so disgusted with her actions and her terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that they kicked her out of office by an embarrassing margin of defeat. Her replacement is a big ole Trump supporter. Them’s the breaks, Liz.

In their statement, Thompson and Cheney said: “The select committee has proceeded respectfully and responsibly in our engagement with Vice-President Pence, so it is disappointing that he is misrepresenting the nature of our investigation while giving interviews to promote his new book.

“Our investigation has publicly presented the testimony of more than 50 Republican witnesses, including senior members of the Trump White House, the Trump campaign, and the Trump justice department.

“This testimony, subject to criminal penalties for lying to Congress, was not ‘partisan’. It was truthful.”

The January 6 committee sunsets at the end of December. The House will have a Republican majority in January when the new session begins so the committee is wrapping up its partisan witch hunt. It is unprecedented how the majority controlled a special investigative committee as Pelosi did with the January 6 committee. She rejected the Republican House members that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy chose and only allowed two Never Trump Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, to do her bidding. Neither of them will be returning to Congress in January. And, Trump is running for president again. How did that committee work out for you, guys?

Mike Pence will enter the Republican presidential primary. He won’t get far, though, because he is never going to be president. But, now is his time and if he waits for another four years, his window will permanently close. He knows it and the book tour is paving the way for his eventual announcement.