Fox News anchor Chris Wallace butted heads with his colleague Brian Kilmeade over President Trump’s response to Roger Stone’s sentencing recommendation.
During a Thursday recording of Kilmeade’s radio show, Wallace argued that Trump was wrong to interject himself in the matter.
“I don’t think the president should have done what he did,” he said. “I don’t think he should have complained about the guidelines that — apparently, they were going to be changed anyway, so just be quiet. Don’t thank Attorney General Barr, and certainly do not attack the judge who’s going to sentence.”
Trump called the Department of Justice’s initial recommended sentence of seven to nine years a “miscarriage of justice.” Shortly after, the department announced that it would be scaling back the longtime Trump associate’s sentencing recommendation to a more lenient punishment. The president then congratulated Attorney General William Barr for “taking charge” of the situation.
“If the situation were absolutely reversed and it were a crony of Barack Obama, and he was about to be sentenced — and look, people went nuts when Barack Obama started saying, ‘Well, Hillary Clinton didn’t do anything,’” Wallace explained, later adding, “People didn’t like that.”
He continued, “Any president, not Obama, not Trump, shouldn’t put their thumb on the scales of justice.”
Kilmeade, on the other hand, defended the president and argued that he still has freedom of speech to respond to current events. The Fox and Friends host also noted that he doesn’t believe the situation should unravel into another impeachment process, as some have suggested.
Wallace agreed, calling the idea of impeaching Trump again over the Stone case “ludacris.”
[Also read: Stone, Ukraine, and Durham: Barr’s Justice Department asserts itself in high-profile investigations]
