CNN’s Abby Phillip and her colleague Scott Jennings had a tense standoff on News Night over President Donald Trump’s pardoning of around 1,500 people for convictions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Barely a day into his second term in the White House, Trump sat down in the Oval Office and, at the stroke of a pen, signed a controversial executive order to quash convictions picked up by a whole host of questionable characters.
“Donald Trump gave blanket pardons, basically, with the exception of a couple of, a handful of people, including people who were violent, including people who assaulted police officers,” began Phillip. “Scott, why is that okay?”
The staunchly Republican Jennings suggested that some of the people given a second chance by Trump might have been “unfairly charged or overcharged.”
“Well, if you were Donald Trump, you would say that I think these people were, in many cases unfairly charged or overcharged, and I made a promise and I kept it. I mean, that’s going to be his political argument,” he said.
But his answer didn’t sit well with News Night presenter Phillip who said starkly: “Do you think that’s true?”
Jennings then went on the defensive, stating that some of these people had already served their time.
“Look, I think that most of these people, vast majority of these people, paid some kind of price and a deep price for what they did. I don’t like what they did, I didn’t like it the day it happened, I don’t like it today. But they did pay a price. Most went to jail, served a term, were financially ruined, had their lives effectively ruined by this process,” he said.
He then appeared to nod to the fact that outgoing president, Joe Biden, finished his term in office with a slew of less fair preemptive pardons.
“There’s no question they faced consequences, unlike if you get a preemptive pardon when you face no consequences. So I think if he were arguing it out, he would say, ‘I don’t agree with the way they were handled by the Justice Department, and it’s my prerogative to make, to make the-” he said as Phillip lost patience and cut across him.
She had said at the top of the segment that the panel would discuss the Biden pardons later on.
Phillip also urged Jennings to think for himself instead of parroting Trump. The host said curtly: “Yeah, I guess I’m not asking you what Donald Trump’s position is. I’m just asking you as a person, as a Republican, as a human being. These are people who were sentenced, but they also committed a particular kind of crime that the government has a very distinct interest in preventing from ever happening again. Don’t you think that there is a responsibility for that to remain on their record, for people to take responsibility for them, for the country to understand there’s no get out of jail free card if you try something like that again.”
He again tried to make the situation seem fair before getting told off like a child, as Phillip yelled “Scott!”
The segment moved on to Donald and Melania Trump arriving at the Inauguration Ball.
On the fourth anniversary of the attacks earlier this month, the Justice Department said that approximately 1,583 individuals were charged with crimes related to the riots that took place as Congress certified the 2020 presidential election.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was overseeing the certification of former President Joe Biden’s election in 2020, called the executive order an “outrageous insult to our justice system and the heroes who suffered physical scars and emotional trauma as they protected the Capitol.”
