Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said during an interview this week that he was willing to pardon former President Donald Trump if the facts of the case showed that he was the victim of political weaponization.

DeSantis made the remarks during an interview on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” on Thursday, saying that he will assemble a team on day one of his administration that reviews cases that potentially should be pardoned.

The remarks come as the former president faces two federal criminal investigations, including an investigation into his handling of classified government materials and an investigation into his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“Do you think the January 6 defendants deserve to have their cases examined by a Republican president?” Travis asked. “And if Trump, let’s say, gets charged with federal offenses and you are the President of the United States, would you look at potentially pardoning Trump himself based on the evidence that might emerge of those charges?”

“The DOJ and FBI have been weaponized. We see that. We see it in a variety of contexts, some of which you mentioned,” he said. “Some of it is the FBI going after parents going to school board meeting. Some of it’s how they treat a pro-life demonstrator, how they don’t go after people that are attacking pro-lifers. And so what I’m going to do is — I’m going to do on day one — I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who are people who are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons. Now, some of these cases, some people may have a technical violation of the law.”

DeSantis also said that he would look to issue the pardons during the early days of his administration, not toward the end as most administrations do.

“But if there are three other people who did the same thing, but just in a context like BLM and they don’t get prosecuted at all, that is uneven application of justice, and so we’re going to find ways where that did not happen,” he said. “And then we will use the pardon power — and I will do that at the front end. You know, a lot of people wait until the end of the administration to issue pardons. We’re going to find examples where government’s been weaponized against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate. But it will be done on a case-by-case basis, because I think you’ve got to make sure that … there’s a whole bunch of cases that don’t necessarily get headlines. But if people are being treated just because they don’t get on TV or something, they’re being treated disfavorably. They need to have a fair hearing as well.”

When asked if he would consider even pardoning Trump, DeSantis said, “I would say any example of disfavored treatment based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review, no matter how small or how big.”

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Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis hit former President Donald Trump during an interview Friday over a “jailbreak” bill that he signed into law as president and for not having control of his own government.

DeSantis made the remarks during an interview with Ben Shapiro, editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the top conservative podcast in the nation.

“Florida’s crime rate is at a 50-year low,” DeSantis said. “That’s just a fact, and it hit a 50-year low during my administration. But a lot of that is because local people, local government, local law enforcement, have done a good job, but it’s hit a 50-year low while crime has been spiking in other places around the country.”

“So that’s delusional to say that somehow Florida has bad crime, and you can see that in the migration patterns,” he continued. “People are leaving high crime areas and they’re coming here. When the Floyd riots were going on in Minneapolis, I called out the National Guard in Florida immediately, I had state law enforcement deployed.”

DeSantis later added that “under the Trump administration, [Trump] enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill. It’s called the First Step Act.”

“It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now re-offended and really, really hurt a number of people,” he said. “So one of the things I would want to do as president is go to Congress and seek the repeal of the First Step Act. If you are in jail, you should serve your time. And the idea that they’re releasing people who have not been rehabilitated early so that they can prey on people in our society is a huge, huge mistake.”

When asked about the 2020 election, DeSantis said that the problem was that Trump enabled people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who in turn put policies into place that Democrats at the state-level used to implement voting rules like universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.

“I also look at how the federal government colluded with some of the tech companies to censor information like the Hunter Biden story. That’s election interference. It’s totally unfair,” DeSantis said. “But I would also point out that it was Donald Trump’s FBI and Donald Trump’s DHS that was doing that; he didn’t have control over his own agencies. If somebody in my government were doing that, they would’ve been fired the next day.”

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“And so you’ve got to take the responsibility as the candidate to shape the battlefield in a way that’s going to be most advantageous to your side winning,” he said. “So what I’ll do, obviously in Florida we did it very effectively, but nationally, you look to see what the rules of the game are. Yes, we ban ballot harvesting in Florida. That’s what you should do. Yes, we ban Zucker bucks in Florida. That’s what you should do. However, not every state has done that. So if you’re in a state like Nevada, that’s a mass mail balloting state with ballot harvesting and Zucker bucks, we will have organizations in place so that we can exploit that system. If you have it in Wisconsin, we will have organizations in place to exploit that system. I think telling people not to send in a mail ballot is a huge mistake and it ends up reducing the pool of prospective voters.”

“In Florida, we focused on some of these low propensity voters in my reelection. They usually vote in presidential, they don’t always vote in midterm, and we converted a lot of them to vote. Most of them chose to vote by absentee ballot through the mail. That was their choice,” he concluded. “If we told them you could only vote on election day, some of them very well may not have voted. So understand the battlefield, it’s your responsibility as a candidate to head off that. But every single candidate that we would nominate is going to face this from the Left, the Democrats, and the media. And what I’ve told people, if you nominate me, I’m not going to make excuses. I’m going to get it done and will be sworn in as president on January 20th, 2025.”

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