Vivek Ramaswamy has long maintained that he would pardon former President Donald Trump if he manages to make it past his current third-place ranking, sweeps the nomination, defeats Joe Biden, and makes it to the White House on Jan. 20, 2025. But his reasoning on Sunday for why would confound legal scholars—by his own admission. Ramaswamy told CNN host Kasie Hunt on State of the Union that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest charges against Trump—which claimed he obstructed justice after he ordered a swimming pool drained into a room with Mar-a-Lago’s surveillance footage—amounted to a process crime. “So you think destroying evidence is a process crime?” Hunt asked him. “I think it is, by definition,” a process crime,” he answered definitively. “Nobody left, right—any legal scholar—will agree with me on that statement. That is by definition a process crime. A crime that would not have existed but for the existence of an investigation.”