“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough is pretty curious about Donald Trump’s mob connections after the former president said in 2016 that only “the mob takes the fifth” – then proceeded to plead the fifth more than 400 times in a deposition this week.
In a scheduled deposition in New York on Wednesday – pertaining to a different investigation than the one that led to a raid of Mar-a-lago this week – the twice-impeached former president invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and declined to answer any questions from the state’s attorney general.
Though the Fifth Amendment is a right anyone can invoke so as not to self-incriminate themselves or incriminate loved ones, Trump’s decision to do so met heated backlash, considering his past thoughts on the practice. Pulling up the receipts, “Morning Joe” showed several of those moments in which Trump expressed distaste for the amendment.
“You sit there Mika and you listen to it, and he goes ‘Fifth Amendment, fifth –’, you know, what’s he doing? Well obviously, he was practicing!” Scarborough said after the footage.
As co-host Mika Brzezinski continued to contextualize the footage, she noted that Trump pleaded the fifth more than 400 times during that deposition, leading to a gobsmacked Scarborough. Brzezinski then posed several questions for Trump: “Does he still think it’s disgraceful? Does he think it’s something you only do if you’re guilty? And does he still think it’s something that the mob does?”
To the first two, Scarborough interjected “400 times over disgraceful” and “400 times guilty.” But to that final question, he offered a theory.
“400 times! Is he mobbed up?” he wondered aloud. “Is that what he’s telling us? Is this confession? Is this projection? Only time will tell.”
You can watch the full segment from “Morning Joe” in the video above.
