Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” 2020 presidential hopeful South Bend, IN Mayor Pete Buttigieg said President Donald Trump’s proposal to pardon some service members accused of war crimes was “a slander against veterans.”
Partial transcript as follows:
RADDATZ: I want to go to comments that the president made about service members who have either been accused of war crimes or convicted of war crimes. He said we teach them to fight and they get treated unfairly and he is going to look at those cases to see if perhaps they can be punished.
BUTTIGIEG: The idea that being sent to war turns you into a murderer is exactly the kind of thing that those of us who have served have been trying to beat back for more than a generation. For a president, especially a president who never served, to say he’s going to come in and overrule that system of military justice undermines the very foundations, legal and moral, of this country. Frankly, his idea that being sent to fight makes you automatically into some kind of war criminal is a slander against veterans that could only come from somebody who never served.
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