Florida governor Ron DeSantis suggested strongly that if elected, he’d pardon former president Donald Trump if the latter were convicted in the various cases pending or looming against him now. And the governor floated a radical proposal for criminal justice reform in politically tinged cases.
Mr. DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, cited during an interview on July 28 with Megyn Kelly a historic pardon while resisting an explicit commitment to do the same for Trump.
“Given your views on the weaponization of government,” Ms. Kelly asked after DeSantis had expanded on that, “would you commit to pardoning him on any federal charges against him?”
“What I’ve said is very simple. I’m going to do what’s right for the country,” Mr. DeSantis told the former Fox News and NBC host on her show on YouTube, which has over 1.3 million subscribers, and Sirius XM radio. “I don’t think it would be good for the country to have an almost 80-year-old former president go to prison.”
“Is that a yes?” Ms. Kelly bored in.
“It doesn’t seem like it would be a good thing,” Mr. DeSantis continued about sending a former president to prison. He cited President Gerald Ford’s pardon of former president Richard Nixon after his resignation in the Watergate scandal in 1974.
“You know, Ford pardoned Nixon and took some heat for it,” Mr. DeSantis said before steering the conversation back to his candidacy against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
“But at the end of the day, it’s like, do we want to move forward as a country? Or do we want to be mired in these past controversies?
“I think the public wants a fresh start. I think they want somebody that’s going to focus on their issues. We’ve had a lot that’s happened over the last five or six years. I get that. But going forward, we’ve got all these issues that we’ve got to deal with.
“I’ve also said this, on ending weaponization, we will wield the pardon power if normal Americans have been targeted unfairly. I’m going to look to see, okay, was there a separate standard of justice applied?
“As soon as the election is over, we want people to apply who may have been treated dissimilarly, and then you can go and do that appropriately.
“And then the flip side of that is, people that are connected to the swamp are going to be held accountable. They are not going to get a lower standard of justice.”
“You said Trump should have done more on January 6. Like what?” Kelly asked.
“I think it’s been well documented, his conduct when it first started, how he sat there. You know, he obviously could have leaned in harder. I mean, even his own kids were texting, saying, you know, he needs to do more.
“Is that criminal, though? I mean, that’s the thing when you talk about a grand jury and a potential criminal indictment. You can identify flawed conduct, you can criticize his conduct, but you have to find a statute that was violated,” the former federal prosecutor told Ms. Kelly.
He criticized Attorney General Merrick Garland for stretching the law to target the former president.
“They may be taking statutes from the Reconstruction era that were about making sure that freed slaves had civil rights, and they may apply that on Trump?”
Political differences should not be a barrier to prosecution, he said. “You could be a Republican administration. It doesn’t mean you can’t prosecute a Democrat and vice versa.”
With a bank robbery, he said, a law was clearly violated, and the state sets out to prove it to hold the defendant accountable.
“To take a statute like conspiracy against rights, and trying to shoehorn in his conduct on Jan. 6, that is what’s going to cause people to say, ‘Wait a minute.’ “
With the justice system’s apparent “weaponization” against political opponents, Mr. DeSantis said how he’d solve a glaring problem.
“In [the District of Columbia] there’s a big problem that we have in terms of being able to get fair trials, if you are part of the swamp. When [Special Prosecutor John] Durham went after that guy, he got acquitted. He had him dead to rights, but he got acquitted in front of a D.C. jury.”
Mr. DeSantis alluded to the acquittal by a Washington jury in May 2022 of Michael Sussmann, a former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer charged with lying to the FBI when he passed along a tip to them about Mr. Trump’s Russia ties in 2016.
“If you’re not part of the swamp, man, they will go and nail you to the wall for jaywalking.
“One of the things I want to do and work with Congress [on] is to give Americans the right to remove a case, if they’re charged in D.C., federally remove it to their home judicial district, because I think you’d get a fair jury pool.
“That’s a 95 percent very liberal jury pool. And in a politically charged case, I don’t think that’s going to be fair. And that’s an imbalance that we have, where the swamp protects its own.
“So people are effectively immune, because they can get acquitted in front of that jury. But then if you’re challenging the swamp, man, they will nail you to the wall.”
