President Donald Trump's reported desire to pardon military service members who have been either convicted or accused of war crimes has drawn a lot of controversy -- and the reporter who broke the story about the president's planned pardons told CNN on Monday that no one should underestimate how serious this is.
While appearing with CNN's Kate Bolduan, New York Times reporter Dave Philipps said that the military believes Trump will try to pardon a Blackwater contractor who was killing multiple people in a traffic circle in Iraq, a Special Forces officer who confessed to killing a detainee in Afghanistan, and multiple snipers who desecrated the corpses of dead Taliban fighters.
Philipps then explained how mass pardons of war criminals on this scale are "unprecedented" in the United States.
"To pardon people who are accused of very serious crimes -- premeditated murder, attempted murder -- these are the most serious crimes in the military," he said. "There isn't anything like that since President Lincoln was alive."
Watch the video below.
