‘Corruption Through and Through’: Amy Klobuchar Takes Blowtorch to Trump Pardons Where ‘He’s Saying Screw You to the FBI’
Sen. Amy Klobuchar tore into President Donald Trump for issuing a series of presidential pardons to former confidantes, war criminals, and political supporters as his presidency wound down, blasting the moves as “corruption through and through.”
On Tuesday night, the White House announced 20 pardons or commutations, included among them were George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign official convicted of lying to the Mueller probe, four Blackwater contractors convicted for infamous murders of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, and two former Republican Congressmen, Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter, who pleaded guilty to fraud. Collins was the first GOP House member to endorse Trump’s 2016 campaign run; Hunter was the second.
Speaking with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Klobuchar, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, was aghast at the flagrant cronyism Trump displayed in this exercise of presidential power.
“I thought this would be a nice holiday interview with my tree and here we are,” a slightly exasperated Klobuchar told the MSNBC host. “Hearing these stories, he is literally trying to burn the house of justice down on his way out the door. He’s saying ‘screw you’ to the FBI, ‘screw you’ to the line prosecutors. These are the hardest cases to make against sitting Congressmen. They did this, they put them away for good reason.”
“And all these cases are so disparate, they don’t really have an organizing principle,” she added. “But what they have in common is what [New York Times reporter] Mike Schmidt pointed out earlier in your show and that is that 88% of these pardons are somehow related to Donald Trump or his political goals. And it is corruption through and through.”
That figure came from a New York Times report in which Schmidt and co-author Maggie Haberman cited an analysis that found a stunningly high number of the few acts of clemency granted by Trump are directly tied to him.
A tabulation by the Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith found that of the 45 pardons or commutations that Mr. Trump had granted up until Tuesday, 88 percent aided someone with a personal tie to the president or furthered his political aims.
“That’s what’s unbelievable about this,” Klobuchar added moments later. “As we sit here today knowing that the Secretary of State has been very clear that Russia engaged in a major, major hack of our country just now, and [Trump] is literally sending the message, this president, by pardoning these people that were involved and, of course, dozens of people were indicted in that Russian investigation involving our election. He’s sending the message: ‘Go at it.'”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
