I was shocked by the sheriff

Trump supporters desperately spreading fake photos on Twitter "from" Trump's Phoenix Rally. pic.twitter.com/NzEG8I04zX

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 23, 2017

From the Times report:

Mr. Trump also implied that he planned to pardon Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., who became a national symbol of the crackdown on undocumented immigrants with round-’em-up searches that landed him in legal trouble. “Was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job?” Mr. Trump asked to wild whoops and cheers.

“I won’t do it tonight because I don’t want to cause any controversy,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ll make a prediction: I think he’s going to be just fine.”

Translation: "I won't do it tonight because my minders won't let me. But I'll cause all the controversy I can anyway."

No, incidentally, Arpaio wasn't convicted for doing his job. He was convicted for doing it wrong, so wrong that it amounted to criminal misconduct:

• Criminal contempt of court: Having Latino people harassed and arrested not on suspicious behavior but merely on account of the color of their skin (that's "racial profiling") in traffic stops, workplace raids, and neighborhood sweeps, and refusing to stop in defiance of court orders
• Failing to combat serious crimes such as sexual abuse: ignoring hundreds of cases of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse of girls, many involving the children of unauthorized immigrants, in its single-minded pursuit of the immigration cases that aren't even part of the county's responsibility—it's federal law—leading to overall increases in the county's violent crime rate, according to a Justice Department civil rights complaint
• Creating what he himself boasted was a "concentration camp":

Arpaio is best known for establishing Tent City, a sprawling, outdoor detention center which he once positively compared to a “concentration camp.” Temperatures in Tent City, which is surrounded by an electrocuted [sic from ACLU source] fence, could reach up to 141 degrees; one detainee said life in Tent City felt “like you are in a furnace.” People held there wereprimarily Latinos — he called it “the tent where all the Mexicans are” — and were put into chain gangs and subjected to humiliating practices like public parades.

Women of color in Arpaio’s jails were particularly mistreated. The Justice Department discovered cases where Latina detainees were “denied basic sanitary items” and were “forced to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation” or were put into “solitary confinement for extended periods of time because of their inability to understand and thus follow a command given in English.”

• Neglecting the health of detainees to a degree that a federal court called a violation of their constitutional rights, especially those suffering from mental illness, leading to death rates far higher than found in other county lockups throughout the US, and extraordinary numbers of suicides, while the office refused to conduct any inquiry. Some deaths really should have been charged as homicides, like the case of Deborah Braillard:

A loving mother with a petty drug appetite, her real issue was that she was diabetic.

Though informed that she was a diabetic, the staff in the jail paid no heed.

In fact, jail records documented that she was a diabetic that needed insulin to survive.

The jailers ignored their own records.

A cellmate described Braillard:

"She was unconscious," said Tamela Harper. "She wasn't hardly there. She walked back to her bunk, and that was the last time I saw that lady walking. People [other inmates] were helping her. She was throwing up constantly. The next day she started moaning and groaning and throwing up. She was basically unconscious at the time. She couldn't speak. She couldn't eat. The officers kept saying she was kicking heroin."

For the next 60 hours, Deborah Braillard suffered the agonies of hell as she went into a diabetic coma .

She died because jailers did not administer insulin.

• Abuse of office, including misappropriation of tens of millions of dollars of state funds to conduct immigration raids, investigate Arpaio's adversaries, and pay for personal travel; intimidating his perceived enemies in politics, court system, and press; and harassing critics and protesters. He even staged an assassination attempt against himself, jailing an innocent man as the fictional assassin for four years (the county ultimately paid out $1.1 million in taxpayer dollars to Arpaio's victim as part of a settlement, together with an undisclosed amount from their insurance company). As of last March, his racial profiling cases alone had cost the county $56 million. Phoenix New Times calculated the total cost to taxpayers of his various misdeeds at $243 million.

I guess you can see why Trump would like the guy.

Via obamareleaseyourrecords, you see these people are really connected.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.