I’m feeling lazy and I’m not going to look it up. But I assume there is a federal law which prohibits government employees from accepting money in exchange for performing some aspect of their job duties in a preferential manner. For example, it’s legal for the President to veto a bill but if I paid the President a million dollars to veto a bill, that would be illegal.
Presumably the same principle applies to pardons. The President can legally pardon people. But it’s illegal to give or receive money to in exchange for a pardon.
Something just occurred to me. Has there been any statement about what time period is being investigated? We’re all assuming the Justice department is investigating the Trump administration. But what if they’re making a last minute attack against the Obama administration?
One of the many unpleasant discoveries of the Trump administration is that many of the prescribed limitations on the behavior of elected officials specifically exclude the office of the President, and the only reason it hasn’t been an issue before now is that the previous officeholders haven’t been conscienceless anal warts who didn’t give a shit about propriety. Like, for just one of a hundred examples, members of Congress are obliged to use blind trusts to avoid conflicts of interest in their investment portfolios, but the President is not encompassed by the rule. You will forgive me if I am skeptical that the anti-bribery statute to which you allude contemplates these sorts of previously-unthinkable transgressions.
Yeah, I thought about that, too. There’s been more fulsome reporting on the circumstances since, though, so I don’t think this is the situation.
How we know what we know arose out of a sealed motion by US attorneys seeking to review information seized as part of a previously-granted subpoena in another case (about which we know even less!). Judge Howell granted the motion. Because some of the material was asserted to be subject to attorney/client privilege, a filter team was used to review the documents before they were passed to the investigative team.
It was the filter team that stumbled across the emails and other information they felt warranted a new investigation into the bribery-for-pardon scheme. (What a thing to find!)
After Judge Howell reviewed the documents, it was she who determined that 1) the documents did not properly fall under the attorney/client privilege; and 2) that the public had a right to know about what was in the documents. Here’s the critical point: The US attorneys objected to making the information public. Howell responded to their concerns with the heavy redactions noted in the released materials.
If Bill Barr knew about this operation and it involved Obama or Biden people, he’d have been crowing about it from the rooftops. I’m not even sure he knew about this investigation – or the other one either, whatever it is.
The other thing I think it tells us is that even though one of the subjects of this new pardon/bribery investigation is currently a guest of the Board of Prisons, there are others involved who have not yet been charged. If everyone was already charged, there would be no need for the heavy redactions. The US attorneys presumably didn’t want to tip their hand ahead of those arrests. They maybe didn’t want the fact of this investigation disclosed until they were safely under a Biden DOJ. Judge Howell has complicated this matter for them, but I’m sure she weighed the public’s right to know carefully against their concerns.
One good thing: Now that the facts of the matter have been made public, Bill Barr can’t just sweep it under the rug before Biden takes over. It will also serve as a warning to Trump to be very careful about what pardons he grants and under what circumstances. Not that he’ll pay any attention.
The pardon might be legal but the President could be impeached or indicted for bribery and so could be briber, unless the pardon covered that, and still there is state law.
However, like i said, we are not Constitutional Scholars and many of the things in the Const have limits. For example, the President is the Commander in Chief, but he still cant give a illegal order to the Army.
Donald Trump selling a pardon would be the least surprising crime ever committed in the history of crime. I would honestly be floored, just absolutely shocked, if he HADN’T sold a pardon or three.
We’re kind of going down a rabbit hole here that the courts have never considered because . . . well, no President has been corrupt and/or stupid enough to test it. But I have to think that the courts would not hold a pardon explicitly offered as part of a bribery scheme – or a subsequent “pardon of the pardon” – to be a valid acts.
One reason why is that the Supreme Court has held that the act being pardoned must be in the past – it cannot be ongoing or in the future. A pardon-for-cash scheme would be ongoing at the time of pardon, since the act of the pardon itself IS part of the crime. A subsequent attempt to “pardon the pardon” would likewise very likely be viewed as a continuance of the same bribery scheme and therefore “ongoing.”
Would State AGs have anything to work with? If, for example, I were going to the slammer for Federal Tax Evasion, but bribed, say, Jared for a pardon for both tax evasion and bribing Jared, would the NJ AG (where Jared and I were when I did the crime) have any thing they could do?
I think that’s the point DrDeth making up above, where he refers to state law. I guess it would depend on whether the state law is framed in a way that would cover it?
This is really more a discussion of Trump’s incompetence than his criminality. I don’t think anyone doubts he is criminal enough to sell pardons. But there have plenty of accusations of past Presidents “selling” pardons. But in legal terms, past Presidents have been smart enough to create a means of giving a pardon and receiving money in a way that remains within the letter of the law.
Trump’s likely downfall will be that he won’t figure out how to do that. He’ll just have people handing him envelopes full of money.
Nope, they’re using kompromat , not bribes, to control him
Maybe dangerous to ask but what kompromat could possibly be worse than what is already publicly known? a pee tape? a teenage gigolo? Those aren’t going to change anyone’s mind. My imagination is failing me.