On Saturday, in the wake of Attorney General William Barr ordering federal executions to resume for the first time in decades, legal analyst Elie Mystal hammered the political and academic establishment on MSNBC's "AM Joy" for continuing to treat this administration as normal and deserving of legitimacy.
"As I said in the last segment, the white supremacy is the point of the Trump administration, and Barr is just another one of the executioners, pun very much intended," said Mystal. "My question is this. Joy, you and I were on right after he was nominated, right as he was dealing with the Barr report, and you and I had to deal way lot of people who told us that William Barr was an institutionalist, told us that William Barr was going to do the right thing. So now all those people were wrong and we are right. What do we win from that?"
"When are we going to understand that the people who work for Trump, every person who works for Trump, is complicit in the atrocities and human rights violations that the Trump Administration creates?" thundered Mystal. "When are we going to understand that, when are we going to start reacting to that, when are we going to start treating them that way? When are we going to stop giving them fellowships at Harvard and Yale University? When is the accountability for these people's actions?"
"Yes, they're in office now. Yes, they're in power now. Good job," added Mystal. "Eventually William Barr is not going to be the attorney general anymore, and what's going to happen to him then? I'm willing to vote for the Democratic candidate who is going to do something about these people once they are no longer clothed in power."
Host Joy Reid agreed. "He doesn't seem to have even a sense of history of where he will land in it. None of them do," she said. "That's, I think, the thing that's most shocking about the Trump Administration is that the corruption is open because none of them fear the consequences. They know they'll do what they're doing and land a sinecure at Harvard and it's all good."
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