CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: His low point was something that you seemed to brush off as something that would only concern the left. When you look at your opponent, and you threaten to put your opponent in jail, you have gone way over the line of political decency in this country. That's not Hitler, Stalin. That's banana republic.
BILL O'REILLY (HOST): All right, I disagree --
KRAUTHAMMER: That's what happens in a -- but let me just -- I've got a thought, and I'm going to finish it.
O'REILLY: All right, go ahead.
KRAUTHAMMER: And that is, we have had 250 years of miraculous transfer of power, with -- done peacefully and consensually. The one thing we don't do is to put people in jail or to execute them. In other countries, your life can be on the line in elections, and we had a long history where you don't even talk about that.
The breach of that etiquette, of talking about “I'm going to personally order a special prosecutor,” -- incidentally, the law wouldn't even allow that, but nonetheless, and then you would be in jail, as if he's pre-judging it, is something that should never be done and is another example of Trump lowering the level of our discourse.
O'REILLY: All right, I disagree, because, number one, he has to play to a certain voter, all right? Who does believe that Mrs. Clinton got away with a national security violation that no one else would have gotten away with. Millions and millions of those voters out there. So, yeah, you're right, he can't put anybody in jail if he's president. You can't just sign executive orders and one is incarcerated, but certainly he would have the power to -- his Justice Department would, to reopen an investigation that the government deemed to be not credible. He does have the power to do that, and I wasn't offended by that so much in the sense that I knew it was a quip off the top of his head which, you know -- and I think it helped him. I really believe that helped him.
KRAUTHAMMER: But you always defend Trump saying “He said x, oh it perhaps was not the right thing to do, maybe it was constitutional” --
O'REILLY: Oh, you didn't believe he literally was going to put 'em in jail, do you?
KRAUTHAMMER: -- “But he was appealing, and it works for him.” Works for him is different from saying it's the right thing to do.
[...]
O'REILLY: We want civility, and we on this program, as you well know, have stayed out of the swamp. But you can't tell me that you thought that Donald Trump was saying, “If I'm elected, I'm going to incarcerate this woman like I would do in an inquisition.”
He was making a point that there would be a special prosecutor, the email thing would be reopened because, again, many, many millions of Americans feel that this was -- the fix was in. That another president, Barack Obama, made sure that it wasn't -- an honest investigation did not take place. So, I hope we have a tradition in this country of honest investigations, and that's how I took it.
