Anthony Scaramucci has been on the job a little over a day and already the Sunday shows are manifesting a level of double speak and chaos to rival the days of the Tower of Babel. Presidential pardons was the talking point this morning and while Scaramucci was on Fox News Sunday telling Chris Wallace that he had been discussing the issue with Trump just last week, lawyer Jay Sekulow was on ABC telling George Stephanopolous emphatically that there were in fact no conversations regarding presidential pardons taking place at all, nor is the topic even being researched.
Wallace: “Why even talk about pardons?”
Scaramucci: “This is one of those things about Washington, the convolution and the nature of things. I’m in the Oval Office with the president last week and we were talking about that, he says he brought that up, but he doesn’t have to be pardoned, there’s nobody around him that has to be pardoned. He was just making the statement about the power of the pardon. Now, all of the speculation and all of the spin is he’s going to pardon himself. The president does not need to pardon himself. And the reason he doesn’t need to pardon himself is he hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Here is Sekulow’s version of the pardon issue, as told to Stephanopoulous:
“The president in that tweet stated something that is rather unremarkable, that is, under the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, the President has the authority to pardon. But, I want to be clear on this, George, we have not, and continue to have not, conversations with the President of the United States regarding pardons. Pardons have not been discussed and pardons are not on the table. With regard to the issue of a president pardoning himself, there’s a big academic discussion going on right now, an academic debate. You’ve got Professor Tribe arguing one point, you’ve got Professor Turley arguing another point, and while it makes for interesting academic discussions, let me tell you what the legal team is not doing. We’re not researching the issue, because the issue of pardons is not on the table. There is nothing to pardon from.”
Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today, that sort of thing?
The spinning wheel is so broken at this point that the spin meisters can’t even construct a basic grammatical sentence, probably because their heads are aching. We know how they feel.