Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that if he were elected president that he would pardon former President Donald Trump if convicted in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
Anchor Dana Bash said, “So before you heard any details of the allegations in the Trump indictment, you put out a statement saying if you become president, you would pardon Donald Trump on day one. Now you’ve seen the allegations, and you’ve seen that he stored highly classified information like nuclear secrets and others in unsecured areas of his country club. Given everything that you’ve seen, do you stand by your promise to pardon him if he is convicted?”
Ramaswamy said, “Reading that indictment and looking at the selective omissions of both fact and law, then I’m even more convinced that a pardon is the right answer here.”
Bash asked, “Why?.”
Ramaswamy said, “The top question actually we should be asking is what did Biden tell Merrick Garland? And what did Merrick Garland tell Jack Smith? Because what I see in the document is deeply politicized. Not a single mention of the Presidential Records Act, the most relevant statute to the actual, alleged crime here. Selective statements from President Trump, statements on the campaign trail in 2016 about classification and how he would treat it without one mention of the fact that he actually after he was elected in 2016, said he would not prosecute Hillary Clinton and would not want to see her prosecuted. No one mentioned this. Yet this stood out to me. The classification scheme itself was defined not by statute but by executive order, which is interesting because executive orders appellate courts have held do not bind a U.S. president with the force of law. This is selective prosecution. I think it is irresponsible not to have included any treatment of those facts or law in this indictment.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.