Richard Painter is a former ethics lawyer for George W. Bush between 2005-2007. This is a dubious distinction but it does put him outside of the more godawful Bush era ethics decisions of torturing people. He’s been intensely critical of Donald Trump’s presidency, calling Trump’s actions traitorous. The Minnesota law professor also filed a lawsuit last year against Trump over the ethics of his business interests and refusal to sell off those interests once in office. Painter was brought onto MSNBC to duke it out with Scott Pruitt friend and apologist Hugh Hewitt. If you don’t know who Hewitt is you can read about the kind of asshole he is here. Suffice it to say, he’s a Trump supporter who is “good friends” with Scott Pruitt AND the lobbyist who rented Pruitt the Washington, D.C. condo for $50 a night. Asked about whether the recent spate of conservatives coming out to criticize the clearly corrupt EPA chief Scott Pruitt, Richard Painter had this to say:
I think we're finding Republican supporters of president Trump, one by one, starting to realize that this administration is corrupt and has been corrupt from day one. And our lawsuit is about foreign government money that has been going to the president in violation of the United States constitution. We have the incidents involving cabinet members getting favors and money from lobbyists. We just today had the president of the United States making statements that were false, probably knowingly false, about Amazon, driving the stock price if an investor lost money in that stock, the investor could sue him for securities fraud.
And those investors ought to be calling a lawyer. It's every day we have a new violation of either the constitution, the federal statutes or the ethics regulations. It's over and over again. And yes, I think people like Chris Christie are finally getting fed up. And the voters are getting fed up. I've been fed up with this president ever since he was a candidate, and it was very clear he was going to violate the law if he won the election; and that’s what we’ve had non-stop.
Hewitt defended this by saying that Pruitt wasn’t allowed to stay at his apartment in Washington, D.C. because of the “gift rule,” that Pruitt claims he hasn’t broken here. Painter began to get pissed at Hewitt’s grotesque obtuseness.
Comments are closed on this story.