A legal expert called out President Donald Trump’s top prosecutors for making an easily avoidable mistake that could jeopardize the case against an alleged would-be assassin.
White House Correspondents Association dinner shooting suspect Cole Tomas Allen pleaded not guilty Monday to charges that include attempting to assassinate the 79-year-old president at the Washington Hilton, and CNN’s Elie Honig expressed surprise that Attorney General Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, were remaining on the case.
“The right and easy thing for prosecutors to do here for Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro is to recuse themselves,” Honig said. “It’s not punishment, it doesn’t mean they’ve done anything wrong. It’s simply a bedrock principle of prosecutorial ethics that if you are a potential witness or a potential victim, you’re going to have a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of a conflict of interest, and so the safe thing to do is to pull yourself off the case.”
“But Pirro and Blanche have made clear they have no intention of doing that,” Honig added.
Honig criticized Judge Trevor McFadden at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for his handling of the matter.
“I think the judge is wrong today when he says, well, they didn’t see anything, the shooter never made it into the ballroom, hence they’re not witnesses or they’re not victims,” Honig said. “First of all, they heard gunshots, they’ve confirmed through a witness, and with respect to the claim [that] they’re not victims, Jeanine Pirro herself said in an interview on May 2 to Fox News, she said, quote, ‘I was in the line of fire, I could have been killed.’ So sounds like at least a potential victim to me.”
“I think it’s a mistake if they leave these two on the case,” Honig added. “It could give him an appeal issue down the line.”
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