Morning Joe Rips Pence’s Call to End Mueller Probe With Mashup Comparing VP to Nixon

“I think it’s a fair time to start asking this question,” said Joe Scarborough Thursday morning on MSNBC. “What did Mike Pence know and when did he know it?”

Mike Pence is often spared of the venom spewed by the Morning Joe crew in the direction of President Donald Trump and many others in his administration. But Scarborough and company turned their ire upon the vice president following his comments to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell — in which he called for a hasty end to special counsel Robert Mueller‘s probe.

“In the interest of the country, I think it’s time to wrap it up, and I would very respectfully encourage the special counsel and his team to bring their work to completion,” Pence said.

To Scarborough, that plea from the veep was a red flag.

“Mike Pence has been claiming that he was just out in the dark,” the MSNBC host said. “And that he was just this clueless, hapless Indiana Hoosier that Donald Trump and the rest of the White House said nothing to. But you’ve just got to start asking yourself, if Mike Pence wants to kill an investigation that is pursuing how the Russians tried to undermine American democracy in 2016, my gosh. Makes me sad to say this…but I guess we have to start asking the question why does Mike Pence want to kill this investigation?”

Scarborough likened Pence’s role in the Trump presidency to that of America’s most infamous vice president — one who served in a scandal-plagued administration more than four decades earlier.

“Now playing the role of Spiro Agnew for the Trump Administration,” Scarborough said, “is Mike Pence.”

To drive home the point, the broadcast played Pence’s Thursday morning comments back-to-back with stunningly similar comments former President Richard Nixon made in 1974.

“I mean, I can’t even,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said — reacting to the video.

Co-host Willie Geist added, “For the last almost two years now, Mike Pence has walked a line between obsequiousness — which is what Donald Trump requires out of the people around him — and staying just one foot outside the blast zone, just in case this thing blows up and he can be left standing. It’s unclear that he can continue to occupy that space. You can’t be that close to the president and stay clean.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.

[featured image via screengrab]

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