A CNN panel flagged Vice President JD Vance’s telling word choice in a recent NBC interview Monday morning, a slip they argued could create a major “legal” liability for the Trump administration as it pursues probes of the president’s critics.
Speaking with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” in an interview aired on Sunday, Vance remarked on the Friday FBI raid on the home of John Bolton, Trump’s former security advisor during his first term, now a vocal critic of the president. The raid was followed by President Donald Trump threatening to launch an investigation into former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another former ally of Trump’s turned critic.
Vance was asked whether Bolton was being "targeted because he’s a critic of Trump,” to which he said “not at all.”
“If we were trying to do that, we would just throw out prosecutions willy-nilly like the Biden administration (Justice Department) did,” Vance said. “...We haven't (brought a case against Bolton) yet, the Department of Justice has not done that yet. We're investigating Ambassador Bolton, but if they ultimately bring a case, it will be because they determine that he has broken the law. We're going to be careful about that, we're going to be deliberate about that.”
Edward-Isaac Dovere, a senior CNN reporter, immediately singled out Vance’s language as being contradictory to the Trump administration’s claims that it is not engaging in political prosecutions of its political enemies.
“It's an important word that the vice president kept using in that clip, which is 'we,'” Dovere said. “He says 'we're' doing this investigation, 'we're' going after it; not the FBI, not the Justice Department, he is very clearly saying this is coming from the White House. The 'we' there is not separate.”
The panel’s host, CNN’s Audie Cornish, noted that Vance’s choice of language could “be a legal point to make later on.” Another guest of the panel, New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, also rebuked Vance for his denial of the Trump administration engaging in political prosecutions.
“Yeah, except just in the last 24 hours, President Trump started on Truth Social going after Chris Christie, another former ally of President Trump is a major critic,” Garcia-Navarro said. “The president hates to be criticized on television. Second of all, he really hates people who were former allies and have turned against him; that, to him, is a very, very sore spot.”
