President Donald Trump on Monday defended his pardon of Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, who as sheriff of Maricopa County defied a court order to stop his hardline immigration policing and earned a citation for contempt of court last month. Trump’s comments came at a joint press conference with the…
President Donald Trump on Monday defended his pardon of Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, who as sheriff of Maricopa County defied a court order to stop his hardline immigration policing and earned a citation for contempt of court last month. Trump’s comments came at a joint press conference with the president of Finland, Sauli Niinistö.
“He’s done a great job for the people of Arizona, ” Trump told reporters . “I thought he was treated unbelievably unfairly… They just hammered him just before the election; I thought that was a very, very unfair thing to do. ”
The White House announced the pardon late last Friday afternoon, the traditional time to release a story to attract minimal coverage. That, and the fact that Hurricane Harvey had just made landfall, prompted the president’s critics to accuse him of using the hurricane as cover for the controversial pardon.
In an apparent response, Trump said he picked that time because he hoped the hurricane would help more people to hear about the pardon on TV.
“In the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally, ” Trump said. “You know, the hurricane was just starting.”
When asked about the Arpaio pardon, Trump responded by criticizing a number of pardons made former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, reading facts about their convictions from a paper he pulled from his jacket pocket.
“If you look at as an example, President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, who was charged with crimes going back decades, ” Trump said. “He was pardoned after his wife donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Clintons.”
Trump also mentioned the pardons of Weather Underground bomber Susan Rosenburg and Chelsea Manning, “who leaked countless sensitive and classified documents to Wikileaks, perhaps, and others.” Meanwhile, Trump said Arpaio was a “patriot.”
“Sheriff Joe loves our country, ” he said. “Sheriff Joe protected our borders. And Sheriff Joe was very unfairly treated by the Obama administration.”
