President Donald Trump said Saturday evening that Fox News Channel senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano asked to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and for a pardon for a friend of the former superior court judge in New Jersey.
The president tweeted after his rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that Napolitano turned “very hostile” once his request to be nominated to the highest court in the land was rejected.
“Thank you to brilliant and highly respected attorney Alan Dershowitz for destroying the very dumb legal argument of “Judge” Andrew Napolitano,” wrote President Trump.
“Ever since Andrew came to my office to ask that I appoint him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I said NO, he has been very hostile! Also asked for pardon for his friend. A good ‘pal’ of low ratings Shepard Smith,” he concluded, with a shot at Fox News Channel daytime news anchor.
President Trump’s remarks come after Napolitano called the president’s conduct, as laid out in special counsel Robert’s Mueller report, both “immoral” and “criminal.”
“Prosecutors prosecute people who interfere with government functions, and that’s what the president did by obstruction. Where is this going to end? I don’t know, but I am disappointed in the behavior of the president,” he said this week on his Fox Nation program Judge Napolitano’s Chambers, according to The Wrap.
“If he had ordered his aides to violate federal law to save a human life or to preserve human freedom, he would at least have a moral defense to his behavior,” he went on. “But ordering them to break federal law to save him from the consequences of his own behavior, that is immoral, that is criminal, that is defenseless, that is condemnable.”
Napolitano has flipped in the past year from one of Fox News’s most vocal boosters of Trump to one of the his most outspoken critics. Last week, Napolitano claimed Mueller’s findings was sufficient to “prosecute” the president.
“Depending on how you look at them, there might be enough to prosecute, but the attorney general has decided it’s not enough to prosecute,” he said, per The Wrap. “But it did show a venal, amoral, deceptive Donald Trump, instructing his aides to lie and willing to help them do so. That’s not good in the president of the United States.”
Politico reported in March 2017 that the president met twice with Napolitano during the transition, once in December and another time in January. He is said to have told associates that the president said he was on a list of judges he was picking from for the Supreme Court. “He said, ‘Trump said I’m on the list,’” a source close to the former judge told Politico. “He’s been saying that since the transition.”