‘Are You Kidding?!’ John Harwood Fires Back at Rick Santorum for Dismissing Mueller Probe, Shrugging Off Trump Pardons of Manafort, Stone

CNN White House correspondent John Harwood and former Pennsylvania GOP senator Rick Santorum clashed over Donald Trump’s latest pardons of confidantes convicted by the Mueller probe.

Appearing on a panel alongside Kirsten Powers on Anderson Cooper 360 on Wednesday night, Harwood and Santorum re-litigated the Russian election interference scandal in reaction to the breaking news of Trump granting full clemency to two more figures who were found guilty by the Special Counsel investigation, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.

“Of all these questions over the past four days of Donald Trump’s feelings, about national security and the rule of law. What do these pardons say to you?” guest host John Berman asked Harwood at the outset.

“I think the pardons he did represent open corruption,” Harwood said bluntly. “This is a president whose goal for much of the last four years has been to try to absolve himself politically and legally from the connections with Russia that prompted the Mueller investigation. And these pardons do not dispense with those questions, they affirm those questions.”

Harwood then reviewed the findings of U.S. intelligence and the Mueller probe, which concluded Russia interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump and that her and his campaign’s officials repeatedly attempted to obstruct the investigation and lied to law enforcement about it.

Throughout Harwood’s explication, Santorum could be smirking, grimacing, and slightly shaking his head in disagreement.

“Now the president has pardoned a series of figures who declined to cooperate with Robert Mueller. These are all efforts to shield himself. And I think those efforts will culminate in attempt to pardon himself before leaving.”

Berman then turned to Santorum and asked for his reactions to the pardons, but the former GOP senator wasn’t ready to move on.

“First, I completely reject everything that Harwood said,” Santorum said. “I don’t think that the whole Russian collusion conspiracy, frankly, felt flat and the American public saw it for that…”

“Are you kidding?!” Harwood shot back, interrupting.

“He’s affirming one thing, and that is that he believes he’s not gonna be president on January 20th. If he did believe he’s going to be president on January 20th, he would not be doing these things,” Santorum claimed. “If there’s anything that shows inside the mind of Donald Trump right now, it’s that he has lost and he now wants to do some things that he believes are just before he leaves office. That’s the insights I see from these pardons and really nothing more in this wild conspiracy that everyones’s been trying to allege against him for the last four years.”

“You have got to be kidding?” Harwood fired back again.

“I am not kidding, John. Not at all. Not a cent.” Santorum replied, before citing an attorney general who was widely criticized for misrepresenting the Mueller report to back his dismissal. “Ask Bill Barr whether he believes everything you just said. The attorney general does not believe it.”

” Defies… logic,” an exasperate Harwood said, pushing back.

“No it doesn’t,” Santorum insisted, lapsing into the same “Russia hoax” rhetoric that has become Trump’s favorite rebuttal. “We spent four years talking about something that’s unproven and more of a hoax than what we ever could have anticipated.”

Berman then stepped in to point to the numerous convictions won by federal prosecutions that grew out of the Mueller probe, before circling back to his original question: “Do you feel good about those pardons tonight?”

“Look, I, I, I don’t, I don’t feel, I mean, I’m not a big fan of those guys,” Santorum replied, now noticeably stumbling around for an answer. “No, I don’t agree with Manafort. Roger Stone, again, I don’t like the way he handled himself in this situation. I think he was cavalier and undermined the rule of law. I don’t think he should be pardoned. To suggest those pardons somehow grease the skids, they’ve already been through the trial, John, they’ve already been convicted. You can’t leverage them anymore. This pardon had nothing to do with unshackling people who are leveraged.”

Berman then noted that Manafort did not cooperate with the Mueller probe, prompting a “Right” from Santorum, before the CNN host also pointed out Manafort lied specifically because he was trying to get a pardon from Trump.

Watch the video above, via CNN.