Donald Trump reaches new low by pardoning his racist criminal pal Joe Arpaio

| 9:14 pm EDT August 25, 2017
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Hurricane Harvey is about to hit the shoreline of Texas, and that’s a precarious situation because it’s a Category 4 storm, although Donald Trump’s tweets suggest he still thinks it’s a Category 3. In any case he crassly yelled “Good luck everybody” before heading out for vacation this weekend, suggesting he isn’t really taking the crisis seriously. But he has used the distraction of a major hurricane to sign off on a pardon for his racist criminal pal Joe Arpaio.

Several news outlets including MSNBC are reporting this evening that Trump has in fact officially signed off on Arpaio’s pardon. This is a stunning violation of the rule of law for three reasons. One is that Arpaio is proudly guilty of his crimes and even he hasn’t bothered to try to make a case for why he should be given a free pass, which means this is not within the Constitutional spirit of pardon power. In addition, Arpaio is a close political ally of Trump who heavily promoted him during the 2016 election, meaning that Trump is guilty of cronyism. But the third reason is the most damning.

While he was the Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio engaged in some of the most blatantly illegal and stunningly white supremacist behavior ever seen by a U.S. law enforcement official. He had his officers rounding people up simply for looking Hispanic, and then he tossed them into such unsafe holding areas that even he once privately described them as “concentration camps.” Arpaio was absolutely trying to play Hitler, and he was using his office to do it. Even after the courts ordered him to cease these illegal arrests, he continued – and that’s how he became a criminal himself.

Pardoning Joe Arpaio is arguably the most corrupt and racist thing Donald Trump has done yet, which is saying something. Moreover, he did so while he was supposed to be preparing a response to an impending major hurricane landfall, and then tried to slip the news in under the wire. This is an impeachable act for multiple reasons. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.