On the eve of Hurricane Harvey making landfall in Corpus Christi, President Trump pardoned former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Like Trump, Arpaio is a border security hawk and a “birther” who has repeatedly and publicly expressed doubts that President Barack Obama was born in the United States. After spending nearly a quarter of a century in office, the controversial sheriff dedicated the last five years to investigating Barack Obama’s birth certificate’s authenticity. Only after he lost his final election in 2016 did Arpaio drop the probe.
Arpaio was nationally known for making prisoners in his outdoor tent city wear pink underwear and eat bologna sandwiches—the former to humiliate them; the latter to save taxpayer money. But that may have been saving pennies instead of pounds: Maricopa County spent over a million dollars to settle a wrongful arrest charge resulting from Arpaio and his department framing an individual for attempted murder.
Earlier this week at a rally in Phoenix, Trump hinted he would pardon Arpaio. “Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe?” The crowd roared. “So was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job?”
Why was Arpaio pardoned by Trump? An early supporter of Trump, Arpaio was convicted for committing criminal contempt in regard to violating the rights of latinos as it relates to racial profiling. Arpaio faced up to six months in prison for failing to heed a judge’s preliminary injunction ordering him to stop to targeting latino drivers.
This was Trump’s first official pardon.
In the other half of the Friday Night News Dump, foreign policy advisor Sebastian Gorka is out of his White House job. A former editor for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart blog, Gorka was an odd presence at the White House. He had controversial ties to Hungarian white supremacist groups, was reportedly denied a security clearance to work in the Hungarian parliament, and despite his Ph.D. and national security experience, did not get a job on the National Security Council. Rather, Gorka spent most of his days doing media appearances on Fox News and other friendly outlets.
Sources in the White House suggest that Gorka’s yet-to-be-released resignation letter is “woke” and “legendary.” (Though, it’s hard at this point to outdo recently fired Rich Higgins’s memo.)
Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist was first to report the news, as a resignation by Gorka:
The letter, Hemingway reports, says in part: “Your presidency will prove to be one of the most significant events in modern American politics. November the 8th was the result of decades during which the political and media elites felt that they knew better than the people who elect them into office. They do not, and the MAGA platform allowed their voices to be heard.”
Whatever the text of the letter, it is unclear if Gorka actually resigned, or was pushed out. After the news broke, the White House took the unusual step of sending out a surrogate to make an official statement to reporters disputing this account, saying: “Sebastian Gorka did not resign, but I can confirm he no longer works at the White House.”
And while the fallout from Arpaio and Gorka continues, so does Hurricane Harvey. Just another quiet August weekend.
