Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio seemed to learn Friday during a live TV interview that accepting President Trump’s pardon for a conviction over a violated court order also meant admitting wrongdoing.
“But you accepted the pardon,” MSNBC host Ari Melber said Friday when Arpaio refused to acknowledge he was guilty of criminal contempt of court. “You know under the law that is an admission of guilt.”
“No, I don’t know about that. You’ll have to talk to the legal scholars about that,” Arpaio told Melber, a trained lawyer who studied at Cornell Law School.
Melber then cited Burdick v. United States as legal precedent for how a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.”
Arpaio was convicted in July 2017 of ignoring an injunction prohibiting his office in Arizona from conducting further “immigration round-ups” as part of a decadelong case in which Arpaio had been accused of racial profiling, in particularly targeting Hispanics.
Arpaio was awaiting a possible sentence of up to a year in prison when Trump pardoned him in August.
A federal judge officially accepted Arpaio’s pardon in October, effectively dismissing the matter.
Arpaio announced earlier this month he would run for the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., at the end of Flake’s term.
