Napolitano hits back at Trump: ‘This is the way you treat your friends, how do you treat your enemies?’

Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano responded to President Trump’s claim that the former New Jersey Superior Court judge had asked to be nominated to the Supreme Court, joking Monday about the way Trump treats his “friends.”

Napolitano’s response during an interview on the Fox Business Network comes after the president took shots at him on social media over the weekend. 

“Thank you to brilliant and highly respected attorney Alan Dershowitz for destroying the very dumb legal argument of ‘Judge’ Andrew Napolitano,” the president wrote in first of two tweets to his nearly 60 million followers.

….Ever since Andrew came to my office to ask that I appoint him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I said NO, he has been very hostile! Also asked for pardon for his friend. A good “pal” of low ratings Shepard Smith.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2019

{mosads}“This is the way you treat your friends, how do you treat your enemies? Oh boy,” Napolitano mused in response to “Mornings with Maria” anchor Maria Bartiromo.  

The former judge had said in an op-ed last week that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report “laid out at least a half-dozen crimes of obstruction committed by Trump.”

“Depending upon how you look at them, it might be enough to prosecute,” he said on his series “Judge Napolitano’s Chambers.”

Napolitano on Monday shared his account of several meetings on the high court with Trump, who was president-elect at the time. 

“No. He and I spoke for about three hours and two 90-minute meetings,” Napolitano said when asked by Bartiromo if he asked Trump to be nominated for the Supreme Court. “This is when he was the president-elect about the type of person that should replace Justice Scalia.” 

“And in the process of my describing that person, and the person I was describing was then-Judge Neil Gorsuch, he looked to me and said, ‘sounds like you’re describing yourself,’ ” he continued. “I said no, no I’m not describing myself, I’m describing Neil Gorsuch because you have this list of people from which you want to choose and Judge Gorsuch is the person that I think most of your advisers are going to point to.” 

“This was early on in the process. So he said, ‘Alright, give me a spiel as to why I should put you on,’ ” Napolitano recounted. “Who would turn that down? I gave him the spiel, so to speak, and somebody else in the room said ‘you know that’s pretty interesting, the judge is a little long in the tooth,’ to which the president said ‘blank you’ to the person who said the judge is long in the tooth. ‘I’m four years older than the judge and I’m about to become president.’ It was that kind of a conversation.”

Trump has nominated two judges to the Supreme Court during his first term, including Neil Gorsuch, who replaced the late Justice Antonin Scalia in 2017, and Brett Kavanaugh, who replaced the retired Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018.