Some members of a Special Report panel were so tough on Donald Trump’s claim that he can pardon himself it almost made you think you were watching a real news network and not the Trump News Channel.
Early in the discussion, host Shannon Bream played a clip of Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) saying “Richard Nixon’s Justice Department made it quite clear that Nixon could not pardon himself. The same thing is true here.”
Panelist A.B. Stoddard didn’t mince her words: “We are in the middle of a spin war, of a political campaign that Rudy Giuliani is waging in the press on behalf of Donald Trump, at his request,” she said. “He is not allowed to do this. These are nearly dictatorial powers he’s describing in that 20-page memo and in his tweets this morning, and that is out of line.”
Stoddard also reminded the others, “The Trump team completely lied about the Trump Tower meeting description that the president gave when he dictated a false statement.”
Panelist Guy Benson said it “hurts their credibility” for the Trump team to even discuss self-pardons. “Gaming out self-pardons?” he asked incredulously, “What on earth are we doing here?” He called it a “crazy hypothetical.”
Even Matt Schlapp, husband of White House staffer Mercedes Schlapp (the two were dubbed the “Washington’s Trump-era It-couple’” by the New York Times), would not support Trump’s assertion. “I think what the founders and the writers of our Constitution envisioned is that a politician, the head of our government, the president of the United States, chief executive, the best way to handle these questions is the impeachment process in the House and with conviction in the Senate,” he said.
Bream told Stoddard that her use of the “dictatorial” word “is going to upset a lot of people when they talk about this.”
“I said nearly dictatorial,” Stoddard replied. “They know that Mueller perceives it [the Trump tower meeting] to be an obstruction of justice and it’s likely to be presented in the report that way.”
Watch the criticism below, from the June 4, 2018 Special Report.