Reacting to the bombshell reporting in the New York Times about the Jeffrey Epstein “war room” that was convened in the White House Situation Room, MS NOW’s Sam Stein singled out a proposal about Ghislaine Maxwell that he found beyond the pale.
Speaking with Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire about the report from the Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Stein noted, “There's one anecdote in there where they talk about whether they should give a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, and the response inside the room has nothing to do with the morality, ethics or legality of it. It's ‘Oh no, that would create a real PR problem for us if we were to do that.’”
“And I was blown away by how cynical that was,” he admitted.
“But really, I think the most interesting and most troubling element of this, well, there's a lot of troubling elements of this, is Todd Blanche,” he said of the current acting attorney general. “Todd Blanche, at the time, is the deputy AG, okay? He is ostensibly part of the Justice Department and therefore should have some sort of separation from the White House. And yet he's sitting in the Situation Room throughout this, plotting ways to shield the president of the United States from public scrutiny and legal scrutiny.”
“He is not acting as a part of the Justice Department. He's acting as Trump's defense lawyer, and he's intimately involved in all the decision-making,” he observed.
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