"This is the way you treat your friends?"

Maria Bartiromo asked Napolitano about this when he joined her on Fox Business, but he shrugged it off and asked “This is the way you treat your friends? How do you treat your enemies?”

Napolitano said the tweets pertained to a series of conversations he had with Trump when the latter was president-elect and trying to figure out who should take Antonin Scalia‘s place on the Supreme Court. Napolitano said that when he described how Neil Gorsuch had the judicial qualities Trump was looking for, the president-elect supposedly turned to him and said: “sounds like you’re describing yourself.”

“I said ‘no, no, I’m not describing myself,'” Napolitano recalled. “‘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.'”

In terms of the “pardon” situation, Napolitano said Trump once asked for his opinion about the conviction of a “mutual friend” of theirs. Napolitano said he thought that the conviction was just, to which, Trump offered “a very strong term” to express his disagreement.

“He said ‘You know this person as well as I do. Call this person up and tell this person he’s going to be on the list of pardons that I will seriously consider.’ That was the extent of that conversation.”

Napolitano concluded by saying Trump’s comments were a “brilliant” way to divert attention from his Mueller commentary.