Pro-Trump advocate and Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett both dismissed the whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump and argued that Trump was “duty bound” by law to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate his potential 2020 rival, Joe Biden.

Speaking with Sean Hannity, Jarrett, the author of two books defending the president and attacking Democrats, offered up a double helping of contrarian, Trump excuse-making on Tuesday night. As Mediaite reported earlier this year Jarret worked for a decade and a half on the network’s news side before being summarily reassigned to be a commentator after his Trump sycophancy “went off the deep end,” according to a senior Fox News source.

On Hannity’s show, Jarret was true to form, mocking Speaker Pelosi’s earlier impeachment announcement and implying she was either intentionally misreading the whistleblower law or not smart enough to understand it. “The whistleblower is not a whistleblower,” he claimed. “You can’t blow the whistle on the president, because he’s not a member of the intelligence community.” Jarrett, however, did not address why the entire US Senate seemed to disagree, when it unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday demanding that the White House make the heretofore surpassed whistleblower complaint available to Congress, as per the statute.

Jarrett then pivoted to making any even more bizarre argument, that Trump would have himself been breaking the law if he had not solicited the help of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky in investigating Joe Biden.

“The president is duty-bound under the ‘take care’ clause of the Constitution, if he knows of a potential corrupt act by a vice president trying to extort a foreign country to shut down a probe that involves his son, that’s bribery, honest services fraud,” Jarrett claimed, pushing a baseless claim. “If he doesn’t do it, it is a dereliction of his Constitutional duty.”

In fact, numerous reports have confirmed that Biden’s public call for the removal of a Ukrainian state prosecutor in 2018 was unrelated to his son Hunter’s involvement in a Ukrainian gas company that had been under investigation. The probe of that company had been dormant for nearly a year, and every other EU country had also been calling for the prosecutor’s removal because he had a reputation for overlooking corruption.

Jarrett did not mention these key details for context, but Hannity nonetheless seized on this novel argument to defend Trump

“So wait a minute, so what you’re saying is the president had a legal responsibility to ask” Ukraine about investigating Biden, Hannity said triumphantly.

“That’s right,” agreed Jarrett.

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2mYuw2o