Fox News host Sean Hannity called for President Trump to protect himself preemptively against new federal investigations when he leaves office.
Responding to an op-ed by Andrew Weissmann, a top prosecutor in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Hannity recommended that Trump use his pardon power as the head of the executive branch to make him immune to future prosecutions related to the Russia investigation.
Hannity said he was in favor of Trump pardoning himself and his family if a Biden administration prosecutes him.
“You’ve got Robert Mueller’s ‘pitbull,’ Andrew Weissmann, writing in the New York Times that he believes that the next attorney general, if it’s Biden’s, should investigate Trump and … prosecute him for potential crimes, going back to Russia. An obstruction on Russia, when it was based on a phony dossier,” Hannity said, contextualizing his call for Trump to pardon himself.
Hannity then referenced his earlier comments made on his radio show, saying, “If that’s what they want to do, if Biden ever became president, I’d tell Trump pardon yourself and pardon your family.”
“The president out the door needs to pardon his whole family and himself because they want this witch hunt to go on in perpetuity,” Hannity said. “I assume that the power of the pardon is absolute and that he should be able to pardon anybody that he wants to?” he asked Sidney Powell, an attorney involved in the 2020 presidential election legal fight.
“It is absolute. It’s in the Constitution. I don’t know about his authority to pardon himself. But it should not be necessary, and aside from that, the president is going to get another four years in office to finish the job he started because the election fraud we are uncovering is massive,” Powell said.
Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who was fired by Trump this month, says that no domestic or foreign actors changed any votes, despite claims by Trump and some of his supporters that the election was “rigged” or “stolen” to the benefit of President-elect Joe Biden.
In the op-ed for the New York Times, Weissmann said the Justice Department should investigate the Trump family despite the fact it may be “painful and hard” for the country.
“I do not come to this position lightly. Indeed, we have witnessed two U.S. presidential elections in which large crowds have found it acceptable to chant with fervent zeal that the nominee of the opposing party should be jailed. We do not want to turn into an autocratic state, where law enforcement authorities are political weapons of the reigning party,” Weissmann wrote. “But that is not sufficient reason to let Mr. Trump off the hook.”
