Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson is calling fellow GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy‘s promise to pardon former President Donald Trump as “wrong.”
Hutchinson called Ramaswamy’s promise an attempt to “get an applause line” amid Trump’s indictment for alleged mishandling of classified documents, while speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
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“Well, that’s wrong. It is simply wrong for a candidate to use the pardon power of the United States, of the president, in order to curry votes and in order to get an applause line. It is just wrong. It shouldn’t happen that way. If you start down that path, it is unending,” Hutchinson said.
“And so we shouldn’t be promising and holding out the fig leaf of a pardon because that undermines our jury system. It undermines the grand jury that found probable cause to have him say there is going to be a pardon anyway for this. That undermines the rule of law in our country I have served my lifetime supporting, and it is offensive to me that anyone would be holding out a pardon under these circumstances,” he added.
Hutchinson also called the indictment “very solid” but said it is a “challenging case for the government” because of what they will have to prove and the potential jurors who could decide the case.
Ramaswamy responded to Hutchinson’s comments in a tweet by calling it “pathetic to watch establishment GOP candidates celebrate” the indictment.
It’s pathetic to watch establishment GOP candidates celebrate with schadenfreude as a corrupt Biden DOJ indicts our main competitor. The indictment is silent on the Presidential Records Act, the main statute relevant to the case; silent on the fact that classification rules were… https://t.co/wMpju5q08Q
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 11, 2023
“If you’re a former prosecutor who’s now making a self-interested argument to try to eliminate your own competitor in the GOP primary and curry favor with CNN, please do your homework first,” Ramaswamy tweeted.
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Both Ramaswamy and Hutchinson are polling in the single digits in the GOP presidential primary, per the RealClearPolitics polling average. Trump currently leads the field, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in second place.
Trump was charged with 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of withholding a document or record, one count of corruptly concealing a document or record, one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, one count for a scheme to conceal, and one count related to alleged false statements.
