Donald Trump’s recent clemency blitz came under fire Wednesday from former Fox News reporter Carl Cameron, who said it proved the president wasn’t fulfilling his promise to “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington.
Cameron, in an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar, noted how hollow Trump’s 2016 campaign vow now sounded, following his pardons and sentence commutations this week for individuals who have “done damage to the American public.”
“So, they’re swamp monsters, right?” asked Keilar, of some of the people that Trump granted clemency to, including former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
“Yeah,” replied Cameron “He’s not draining it, he’s deepening it.”
Elsewhere in the segment, Cameron analyzed the link between those who had been pardoned and how their appeals to Trump were previously reported by Fox News, the widely watched conservative network he left in 2017.
“It could be a two-way street,” he explained. “These may be people that Trump had seen on the list and decided he wanted them publicized on Fox News, and it may have been people who went to Fox News in order to use the venue in order to get to the president.”
“As you saw, the president himself said, ‘I saw it on the news, I saw it on television,’ and it was, of course, a Fox News interview that that happened,” Cameron added.
Check out the clip here: