That’s the new DOJ pardon czar (formerly the acting US Attorney who was so extreme even the GOP Senate wouldn’t confirm him) reacting to Trump pardoning a MAGA sheriff convicted in two short hours for taking tens of thousands of dollars in bribes.
The people who plotted against Gretchen Whitmer were convicted by a jury of their peers. But apparently they are heroes on the right and are now begging for a pardon from Trump who is considering giving it to them. They wanted to kidnap and kill her. I guess that’s fine since they were just kidding around according to Trump.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would look at pardoning the men convicted in a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and swiped at the legitimacy of the case.
“I will take a look at it. It’s been brought to my attention,” Trump said while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job.”
The president said he thought the men convicted in the case, which occurred on the eve of the 2020 election, “were drinking” and “said stupid things.”
Fourteen men were charged in the plan to kidnap Whitmer, a Democrat, and nine were convicted. The ringleader of the group, Barry Croft Jr., was given the longest sentence at more than 19 years.
Trump is now pardoning anyone who pays him big money, is a fellow Reality TV star who “doesn’t look like a terrorist” and publicly supports him, or is a big MAGA cop.
Everyone else, beware, including judges and fellow politicians threatened with assassination — unless they’re MAGA, of course.
As Garrett Graff wrote in his newsletter today:
A lot of attention has come in recent days to the sheer size of the corruption racket surrounding the president and the White House. The New York Times did a great piece this weekend about how Trump is pillaging the presidency, and Evan Osnos — the current reigning king of reporting on oligarchs and the super-rich — this week has a New Yorker piece about “Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder.” As one lobbyist told Evan, Trump’s influence-selling behavior in office is “outer-borough Mafia shit.”
But the spreading corruption around the presidency doesn’t stop with the president.
There’s also a broader, equally worrisome trend playing out at the margins of the national headlines: Day by day, we’re seeing the Justice Department effectively decriminalize and wave away crimes by Trump’s friends and instead selectively focus investigatory resources on Trump’s adversaries and enemies.
This is textbook authoritarianism, a classic example of what one-time Peru president General Óscar Benavides captured in his adage: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”