Jeanine Pirro found an unusual target for the White House scandal surrounding former Trump aide Rob Porter: President Barack Obama.
The retired judge kicked off her Saturday show on Fox News by offering a detailed defense of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s handling of Porter, who was forced to resign after accusations of domestic abuse against both of his ex-wives.
“So, for everyone who’s looking for someone to blame, chill out,” she said.
“You want to stop a four-star general who is running the White House, who believes in chain of command, who makes a decision within 40 minutes, because you hate President Trump? Find another scapegoat. You might want to look at the last president,” she said, offering no further explanation.
Later in the show, another disgruntled former Trump White House staffer, Sebastian Gorka, claimed that federal officials may have deliberately slowed down security-clearance reviews that would have caught the red flags in Porter’s record sooner.
“If they want to gum up the works and make the Trump administration’s job harder and harder, they play bureaucratic slow rolls,” Gorka said, offering no evidence that had occurred.
“It might be a deliberate minefield put in place where they know somebody like this has skeletons in their closet and they slow-roll everything to make things like this explode a few months later,” he added.
For Pirro’s part, she did not seek to defend Porter himself — or back up Trump’s apparent defense of his former aide.
“You want to blame someone, blame the batterer,” she said in her opening monologue. “He doesn’t walk around with a scarlet letter or a sign on his forehead that says, ‘I beat women.’ He is cunning and clever and presents himself as a charming individual who’s a Rhodes Scholar with a Harvard degree.”
Still, Pirro quickly came under fire online for her comments suggesting that Obama was somehow to blame.
https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/962649224004456448
Who does Fox News blame for Trump harborin' serial domestic abuser, Rob Porter?
You guessed it! The black guy!https://t.co/ykO9fIg1AP
— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) February 11, 2018
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, inexplicably and yet somehow predictably, blames Barack Obama for Rob Porter wife-beating scandal https://t.co/sN284yrEqh#SundayMorning#AMJoy pic.twitter.com/WNhzI0vUpv
— Holly Figueroa O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) February 11, 2018
https://twitter.com/AidenWolfe/status/962656919692312576
https://twitter.com/ResistanceZone/status/962677252587773952
https://twitter.com/Elizabeth904397/status/962669854263259136