Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said on Wednesday that he would “pardon” anyone incarcerated due to political prosecutions.
He said cancer that, is the administrative-police state must be treated, and he vowed that The FBI and the IRS would be gone under his watch.
Any federal inmate convicted of unfair or biased investigations or prosecutions will receive a pardon.
Douglass Mackey was a social media troll who went by the “Ricky Vaughn 99” moniker on Twitter; Ramaswamy mentioned him in a video clip that aired alongside his post. In March 2016, a jury found Mackey guilty of charges related to memes he shared on social media during the election season. In these memes, he urged Hillary Clinton backers to “text” their vote instead of physically going to the polls.
Ramaswamy says he’s looking at ten years in prison for making jokes on the internet about Hillary Clinton’s voters. He noted that the identical joke was also made toward Trump supporters and that the jokester remains free.
Before Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the origins of the FBI investigation into charges of collusion between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia was made public, Ramaswamy had already expressed support for dissolving the FBI. The revelation of information about the beginnings of the FBI probe sparked the report.
He reportedly sent $10,000 to the defense fund of Marine veteran Daniel Penny, who is charged with manslaughter for holding Jordan Neely captive in a New York City subway car. When Daniel Penny tried to hold Jordan Neely down, Neely died.
Ramaswamy said the FBI should be disbanded. Municipalities have police and prosecutors, whereas the federal government has the Department of Justice and the U.S. Marshals Service.
The Internal Revenue Service is another political weapon.
During Obama’s presidency, the agency was accused of discriminating against members of the Tea Party. Despite widespread outrage, the scandal’s central figure, Lois Lerner, was not criminally charged.
