Stephen A. Smith Says ‘Clearly, It Could Be Argued’ That Trump Prosecutions Were a ‘Witch Hunt’

Stephen A. Smith said there’s a plausible case to be made that the federal prosecutions of President-elect Donald Trump amounted to a “witch hunt.”

On Sunday, President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden, who was awaiting sentencing after being convicted on federal gun and tax charges. The sweeping pardon covered all federal crimes the younger Biden committed or may have committed from 2014 to 2024. Last year, the president said he would not pardon his son.

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon. “There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.”

Republicans are crying foul, particularly after the president made the rule of law a component of his ill-fated reelection bid, which he abandoned in July.

Trump had his own federal legal woes until he was elected last month. Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted the former president for what Smith said was Trump’s willful retention of classified documents. Smith also prosecuted Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. After that contest, Trump tried to pressure officials in states he lost to subvert the results and ultimately inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol. With Trump returning to the White House, those charges have been dropped.

Appearing on Monday’s Cuomo on NewsNation, Smith said one could “clearly” argue that the Biden administration had persecuted Trump.

“The Biden situation disgusted me in terms of departing only from this standpoint,” he said. “You wanna be a cynic, and you want to act like you would be offended by something like that? If you’re one of those people out there, fine. But no one within reason would and would have a problem with him saying, ‘It’s my son. I love him. There’s no way I’m sending him to jail, and I have the power to avoid it.’ Nobody will blame him for that. But that’s not where he went.”

Smith went on to say his problem with the pardon was that the president characterized his son’s prosecutions as political, and that the same could be said of Trump’s prosecutions:

Well, wait a minute. What have y’all been doing with Donald Trump all of these years? Now, you can make an argument about the legitimacy of the cases against Donald Trump compared to what wasn’t illegitimate, etc. That’s not the point. The point is it was clearly politicized. You had folks on the left who were hellbent on going after Donald Trump because they were determined to make sure that he couldn’t run for reelection, but these elements would get in the way of him possibly winning reelection.

And now we know why more than ever because they weren’t confident they would ever be able to beat him. He’s been the Republican nominee since 2016. He beat Hillary Clinton with the electoral college vote. He wouldn’t concede defeat in 2020, but he did receive over 74 million votes at that particular moment in time. And then you fast forward four years later, despite the 34 felony convictions, the two impeachments, the bevy of crimes that he had been accused of, the Republican voters out there, the conservative voters out there, and a lot of independents from various communities said, “He’s the guy we want.”

And I’ve said it on many, many occasions. It wasn’t about him. Just like it wasn’t about Biden in 2020, it was more against Trump. In this particular instance, it was an indictment against the Biden administration, what’s been going on for the last four years, some of the things going on with the border, obviously inflation, of course, crime in the streets, of course, woke and cancel culture, and all of that. It all played a role.

And so, for him to come out and the talk about that. This was a witch hunt, when clearly it could be argued that’s exactly what you were doing to Donald Trump. What you assisted in doing seems beyond hypocritical, and that was what disgusted me. It wasn’t his decision. It wasn’t him pardoning his son. It was the weak, pathetic explanation that he gave, which has most critics just shaking their heads and raising their eyebrows, saying, “What nerve you have.”

Watch above via NewsNation.