Geraldo In Hot Water After He Suggested a Quid Pro Quo-Type of Trump Pardon
Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera received a great amount of backlash for suggesting a quid pro quo arrangement between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump following the latter’s indictment by the Justice Department on Thursday.
Rivera, who is a co-host of “The Five,” said Biden should consider pardoning Trump if the former president agrees to drop out of the 2024 race.
“As I have said consistently, President Biden should stop this tortured nonsense immediately,” wrote Rivera on Twitter after news of Trump’s indictment broke. “In exchange for former President Trump dropping out of the race for the White House, Biden should pardon him for any and all federal allegations.”
As I have said consistently, President Biden should stop this tortured nonsense immediately. In exchange for former President Trump dropping out of the race for the White House, Biden should pardon him for any and all federal allegations.
— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) June 9, 2023
Rivera received backlash from Trump’s supporters and critics.
“An example of a social media post written for an audience of 1: Leader. Of course it makes no sense as a proposition because the point is to show loyalty to the cult master,” noted NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
“Glad you decided to be honest about the goal,” another user said.
“In addition to this being deeply stupid and morally inane, I’m sure that would go over great if Biden held a presser and said, ‘Don, all these problems could disappear if you just do the right thing and bow out,’” added Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marsh.
“You piece of shit. Voters get to decide who leads this country, not scumbag elites who betray their friends and grow ridiculously large mustaches,” noted “People’s Pundit” Rich Baris. “To Geraldo, Hunter Biden is a scumbag because he’s an…addict, not because he’s a bag man for his dad. And he’d sell out his mom.”
“You and Rachel Maddow have given away the game,” former US Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark said. “It’s completely unconstitutional for DOJ to try to lever Trump out of the race under pain of criminal penalty.”
In an interview on her own network following Trump’s indictment, MSNBC’s Maddow told colleague Lawrence O’Donnell: “But you have to wonder if the Justice Department is considering whether there is some political solution to this criminal problem.
“Whether part of the issue here is not just that Trump has committed crimes, but that Trump has committed crimes and plans on being back in the White House. Do they consider, as part of a potential plea offer, something that would proscribe him, proscribe him from running for office again? I don’t know,” she said.
She compared the situation to when the Justice Department reported brokered a deal with Richard Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew in the early 1970s, who resigned one year before the president during the Watergate scandal era.
“If you go back 50 years instead of 49, you go to that president’s vice president. With Spiro Agnew, you get a 40-count federal indictment that is brought against him. Not related to Watergate. But because of crimes that he was committing in his own office in the White House. In that case, what the Justice Department bravely and nimbly and controversially brokered with him, is that that indictment would essentially go poof in exchange for him agreeing to get out of the White House,” she said.
“Now, I’m not saying that’s the way this should go for former President Trump,” she added. “I’m just saying that, that is the closest allegory that we have got in history. And I do think that there isn’t that much that’s novel about Trump’s crime here. We’ve seen other politicians inadvertently take classified information. We’ve seen other former government officials put on trial for crimes like this. What we haven’t seen is somebody who’s been in the White House who has done it and who the Republican party wants to put back there.”
