Rep. Maxine Waters accused President Trump and his supporters of believing it’s their “right” to “ensure” that black people have no “influence or power.”
“I think you said it earlier today when you talked about this need for Trump and those who support him to want to … have absolute power and to believe that it is their right and their responsibility to ensure that blacks and people of color and others do not rise to any level of influence and power, significant, that would cause them not to be in total charge of this country,” the California Democrat said to MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Sunday when asked about Trump’s decision to commute the prison sentence of his former adviser Roger Stone and criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“This justice system is broken,” Waters added. “It has never really been in our favor, and it has basically been responsible for ensuring that we could never ever get beyond this suppression and this oppression that has been forced upon us for so many years.”
Last week, Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence following a conviction for obstruction of justice related to the Russia investigation.
Trump, Stone, and others argued the conviction was unjust and part of a larger push to bring down the Trump presidency.
“Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” the White House said in a statement after the commutation. “There was never any collusion between the Trump Campaign, or the Trump Administration, with Russia. Such collusion was never anything other than a fantasy of partisans unable to accept the result of the 2016 election. The collusion delusion spawned endless and farcical investigations, conducted at great taxpayer expense, looking for evidence that did not exist. As it became clear that these witch hunts would never bear fruit, the Special Counsel’s Office resorted to process-based charges leveled at high-profile people in an attempt to manufacture the false impression of criminality lurking below the surface. These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice.”
