'Bread and butter corruption': Senator suspects sinister plot behind Trump's pardon spree
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) tore into President Donald Trump's recent string of pardons for powerful and well-connected criminals and criminal defendants — and suggested there is something much more sinister going on below the surface.
Specifically, he argued to MS NOW's Chris Hayes on Wednesday, there is a whole lobbying network at play that has set up a cash-for-pardons pipeline to the White House.
"I mean, he has made a series of what would seem to be audaciously politically toxic pardons," said Hayes. "I mean, a man convicted and sentenced for 40 years for trafficking cocaine into the U.S., someone convicted of an enormous fraud enterprise and defrauding investors. I think today he's now pardoning someone who is indicted by his own Justice Department this July. And when he's asked about it, he says, I don't know who they are. What are we supposed to make of that?"
"Yeah, I mean, my sense is that somebody is getting rich ultimately, that there is a cabal of administration officials and MAGA-friendly lobbyists that are in league together," said Murphy. "They all huddle together at these elite restaurants and clubs in Washington, D.C. and they likely hatch deals in which if somebody pays a MAGA-affiliated lobbyist a couple hundred thousand dollars, then maybe you'll be able to get a pardon and somehow, you know, that deal will be consummated down the line."
"The Binance owner, the owner of one of these big crypto companies, was pardoned," said Murphy. "And this is a bad, bad guy. He pled guilty. I mean, it wasn't like he was contesting the charges. He had essentially set up a company that was being used to launder money for terrorists and for child sex predators, and he got a pardon pretty explicitly because his company had chosen to give Trump's crypto coin advantage in the marketplace."
"And remember, that's not just Trump making money," he added. "That's anybody that gets inside information from Trump on when he's going to boost the cryptocurrency. If they get just two minutes notice of that, they can make millions of dollars and so on. The cryptocurrency stuff, there's clearly a whole group of people around him that are making millions of dollars, and they're handing out favors to folks in the form of pardons in order to make sure that they get their pockets lined."
"I mean, that's like just bread and butter corruption," said Murphy. "And it's kind of wild that Trump doesn't know anything about it, that it's happening behind his back."
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