A CNN panel found itself in the uncommon position of ganging up on one of its own panelists after she defended the proposal of a slush fund entirely orchestrated by President Donald Trump’s handpicked board members.“I mean, I would push back on that a little bit. What you call the slush fund I call the anti-weaponization fund,” right-wing podcaster Emily Austin told the “Table for Five” panel. “I'm sure on both sides of the aisle, we all have friends whose lives have been absolutely ruined, whether they were innocent. And you said that this is going to people who assaulted police officers on January 6th, But the truth is, we don't know where this money is going yet. … But I actually I view this as something very altruistic. Trump did not take the money and put it in his pocket like he could have.”“Well, there lies the root of the problem,” said U.S. Democratic candidate Isaiah Martin. “You just said the very simple fact that we're not going to know exactly who gets this money. I know that there was this testimony inside of the United States Congress in which they said that there's really no rules behind what's going to happen. … You don't think that that's absurd, that the president of the United States can create a fund and divvy payments to people, and we don't know who the money goes to?”Host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked Austin her opinion of Trump’s second proposal removing the IRS's power to investigate or prosecute him or his family over taxes, forever.“Obviously, optically, it looks horrendous,” Austin answered.“Because it is horrendous,” quipped Martin.“But there's also an unprecedented amount of persecution when it comes to the Trump and the Trump family. There has never been a president that has been persecuted as much as Donald Trump,” Austin insisted.“We’ve never had a president who did what he did,” inserted author and panelist Josh Rogin, referencing Trump’s many indictments, ranging from hiding illicit hush money to attempting to overthrow a legitimate U.S. election. “… This is a pattern of the president of the United States pilfering from the national coffers to serve his own political and personal ends. We have the Board of Peace, billions of dollars of taxpayer money without any congressional authorization or oversight. You've got all of the stock trades that he's made, $750 million worth of stock trades on issues that he's adjudicating. This is a level of self-dealing and corruption that no one has seen before. And you have to view this slush fund in that context.”“If President Obama sued his own department or his own IRS and settled with himself, I guarantee you that you and every conservative on Fox would be running around screaming for impeachment,” Martin told Austin. “You guys would be trying to throw him an Alligator Alcatraz.” - YouTube youtu.be
