Donald Trump rode a wave of popularity from his time as a TV game show host all the way to the White House, so it should come as no surprise that he concluded his four year term in office by handing out parting gifts to any number of his associates and others in his orbit. Or, to be more precise, “pardoning” gifts, since Trump spent his waning days in the Oval Office signing pardons for a range of individuals, some of whom had committed genuinely heinous crimes. But one bootlicker who DIDN’T get a coveted pardon was Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who ostensibly tried to cash in his excessive toadying for Trump in exchange for a blanket pardon for himself, as well as a whole host of others.

As John and Jayar discuss in this clip, it’s unclear whether Trump and Attorney General Bob Barr knew at the time that Gaetz was under investigation for alleged sex trafficking, but now it makes sense why Gaetz was so aggressively pursuing all kinds of pardons and casually slipping his own name into the mix as a seeming afterthought. As John points out, Gaetz was eager to use “Democrats’ bloodlust” as the excuse for issuing all these pardons and that made a convenient smokescreen for looking to get out from under the charges being leveled against him in particular.

Jayar suggests that even if Trump and company didn’t know about the specific investigation into Gaetz, they certainly knew that he was a shady character who might well have closets full of skeletons, and so were exercising caution in not acceding to the Congressman’s suspicious request for a blanket pardon. Which, Jayar adds, when you consider the kind of scurrilous characters and miscreants who DID get pardons, it just goes to show how low the opinion of at least some in the Trump White House was about Matt Gaetz.