Trump-aligned comedian Andrew Schulz is pushing back on the president‘s “crazy” pardons.
On the podcast Flagrant, Schulz talked about how Trump admittedly had little knowledge of at least one recipient of his presidential power: money-laundering cryptocurrency executive Changpeng Zhao.
“I don’t know who he is,” Trump, 79, told 60 Minutes last month. “I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
When one of Schulz’s guests brought that up, he recoiled.
“That’s a little wild. You can’t pardon someone [when] you don’t know who they are,” Schulz said, before adding: “unless you’re Biden.”
Schulz, 42, then explained how he interprets Trump’s pardons.
“This is what I imagine the pardons are: it’s either like a favor from someone close to you before you get out of there, somebody who has been loyal to you and got hemmed up in some s–t and you’re like, ‘I need to protect them,’ or there’s political capital in the pardoning,” he said, citing all the convicted Jan. 6 rioters Trump freed on his very first day back in office.
After one guest suggested that people could also just pay for one, they alluded to how crypto exchange Binance had made a $2 billion deal partnering with World Liberty Financial, which is the Trump family crypto business, months before the pardon.
“I mean, that checks out,” Schulz said.
Trump has also been criticized for pardoning the former president of Honduras, who had been sentenced last year to 45 years in prison for crimes, including drug trafficking, which Trump has taken a hard stance on.
“This pardon s–t is crazy,” Schulz added moments later. “Shouldn’t we get rid of that? Why does the president just get to say you allowed to do illegal s–t?”
Schulz didn’t seem convinced by the argument that the pardon power is a check against the judiciary: “I just think it’s like a weird amount of power to bestow upon a president.”
Schulz has split from the president before.
In July, he criticized Trump for doing the “opposite” of what he campaigned on.
“There’ll be people that they’ll DM me like, ‘You see what your boy’s doing? You voted for this.’ I’m like, ‘I voted for none of this,’” he said.
“He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for. I want him to stop the wars—he’s funding them. I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget—he’s increasing it.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The post Trump-Voting Podcast Bro Turns on President Over Pardons appeared first on The Daily Beast.
