The former White House ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush believes it’s high time President Trump was jailed if he promised to pardon people over the border wall.
During an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday evening, Richard Painter discussed the President’s defense of using his own hotel in Florida to host the G7 summit next year, calling the proposal illegal and unconstitutional. Painter then turned to news that the President told aides he would pardon them if they had to break the law in order to expedite the construction of his border wall.
Trump claims he never offered that. A White House official told the Washington Post that Trump was just joking. But if the reporting is true, Painter said it’s time for Trump to spend some time behind bars, raising the ghost of former President Richard Nixon, who was impeached, in part, for asking his lackeys to commit crimes.
“We just heard that he’s telling his subordinates to go ahead and break the law in building the wall, and he’ll get them a pardon,” Painter said. “That in itself should lead to his impeachment, his conviction, and putting him in jail if he actually did that. It’s just going to go on and on if he isn’t shut down by the House of Representatives in an impeachment proceeding.”
Ex-Bush White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter says Trump should be jailed over promise to pardon aides who break the law in order to get his wall built pic.twitter.com/1Oo4EsfSUI
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) August 29, 2019
Happy to hear him say that, particularly given his credentials as a former ethics official under George W (so not a liberal Dem). And he’s right, of course.
Then again, there are so many other things for which the Orange Excrescence should be jailed.
Richard Painter is the epitome of the word ineffectual.
Politically, some impeachable offences are difficult to explain to the general public. But encouraging people to break the law with the promise of a pardon? Easy-peasy!
I’m shocked this information leaked into the public realm. I’d always assumed, I guess, he had these sorts of conversations with his various capos and soldiers while shambling down Pennsylvania Avenue in his bathrobe.
Trump said he was “joking”
That is one of the ways he backtracks.
Joke=Backtrack