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Serving the best Americano in town is up to you. But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new SumUp terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the SumUp point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best selling blends. Visit sumup.com.com. Hey, guys, Sam Stein here again again, managing out of the Borg. I'm joined by Bill Crystal, author of Morning Shots, and also the sort of spiritual guide for everything that we do. Our Buddha. I think I want to disavow that now. There's a lot that goes on on the board that I'm not fully, not only not. You are totally totally responsible. I'm not a guide for. I'm not even responsible for it. But anyway,

It's great, thanks for having. We're going to be talking about Trump's parting, which was the subject of today's morning

shots.

And then after that came out, an even arguably more grotesque pardon story was published by the New York

Times.

We're going to be talking about that too.

All right, Bill, just walk through this morning's morning shots and why you decided to focus on

the story, the sort of larger picture element of it. You know, so I saw this news yesterday that

Trump had pardoned a sheriff, former sheriff in Culpeper, Virginia, about 40, 50 miles maybe

south of here. Basically, he had sold these auxiliary sheriff jobs, which are not real jobs, for $15,000 bucks each, so people could get a nice sheriff medallions. I guess they're useful also for, you know, if you have speeding tickets and maybe some other things. He'd gotten $75,000 in cash. There's video of him with a, it was a shut

and it was an open and shut case. The federal voter justice public integrity division prosecuted

it. He was convicted by a jury of his peers in Culpepper in December, sentenced to 10 years,

jail in March. Turns out he was also a big MAGA sheriff, you know, very anti-immigration, super pro-gun

rights, pro-Trump, very outspoken, been on Fox News a bunch of times. And so yesterday,

Trump pardoned him at the recommendation of his new pardoned attorney in the Department of Justice,

our friend Ed Martin, who we covered quite a lot when he didn't make it as DC, the US, pardon attorney in the Department of Justice, our friend Ed Martin, who we covered

quite a lot when he didn't make it as DC, the US attorney for the District of Columbia,

but he is now at a senior position in the Justice Department, and they used to proudly tweeted

that, or X or whatever, that this was his, he had recommended this pardon, and the president

had accepted the recommendation. And so, so that's, he doesn't deserve a pardon. You know, he overruled. Clearly not. Yeah. But Ed said, no MAGA left behind when he did it. And I think that was the sort of crux of the newsletter, which is, you know, we're sort of used to pardon power being abused. Everyone, every president recently has abused it to a certain degree. Right. But we've never really seen it politicized like this. And it's not just the sheriff Scott Jenkins. It's obviously the January 6 cases. You know, Devin Archer, the pardon attorney who preceded Ed Martin, who we talked to, had to resign because they wanted to give Mel Gibson his guns back. I mean, there's just a whole litany of case and I'll get to the one in the New York Times story. But the point of the warning shots was, you know, what's the actual end result here? If you take it to the degree that they're taking it. Yeah. So, I mean, right, I think the further going forward point, so the going, looking at it point is amazing degree of politicization and also potential corruption, obviously.

And we saw some of that in the first term with the pardons of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn and others, but now it's on steroids.

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