President Donald Trump’s 2020 Republican primary challenger, former Mass. Gov. Bill Weld, says the president may have an appointment with the firing squad.
And he wasn’t joking around.
Weld told MSNBC on Monday that Trump may be guilty of treason in his conversations with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky — and the punishment for treason is death.
“That is treason,” he told Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough. “It’s treason pure and simple, and the penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death. That’s the only penalty.
“The penalty under the constitution is removal from office, and that might look like a pretty good alternative to the president if he could work out a plea deal,” he said.
Moments later a second MSNBC host asked Weld to clarify his stance, just in case he said something he might regret.
Instead, the former Massachusetts GOP leader doubled down.
“How do you see this proceeding? NBC News political analyst Elise Jordan asked Weld.
“Well the legal framework is under the U.S. criminal code, the only penalty for treason is death, it’s spelled out in the statute,” Weld said. “Under the constitution as you know, removal from office, impeachment, and removal from any federal office are treason, bribery and or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
“We don’t have to worry about bribery anymore,” Weld said.
“We don’t have to worry about high crimes and misdemeanors. We’ve got treason and we don’t have to dribble around the [basketball] court,” he continued. “We can go right for the hoop.”
Weld was referring to the revealing developments over the weekend, in which the mainstream media speculated that Trump instructed Zelensky to investigate alleged ties between the Bidens and former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
Trump claims that under the Obama administration, Biden threatened to withhold millions of dollars unless a top Ukrainian prosecutor was fired.
The prosecutor in question was probing Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the country at the time.
You can hear Weld’s outrageous claim for yourself below:
In which @BillWeld2020 suggests Trump should get the death penalty for telling Ukraine to probe Biden’s son pic.twitter.com/S3WsxyBaY1
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 23, 2019
The Horn editorial team