If I’m not thoroughly mistaken, while on Countdown last evening, John Dean, former Nixon Administration Cancer-on-the-Presidency diagnostician, said that our presidents have the authority to issue secret pardons. (I was playing poker online and it almost knocked me off my chair.)
If this is true, there could be a lot of BushCo’s walking around with smirks on their faces.
Before you attack me for posting what you might consider an impossible and utterly farcical concept, maybe you can find a youtube of the Olbermann-Dean conversation or other online reference to its veracity. I could not.
But if a president issues secret pardons, how does the public find them out?
Not knowing where to put this, I chose GD. I hope it doesn’t go to the Pit.
And BTW, I like John Dean, particularly for his testimony during the Watergate hearings.
The Constitution doesn’t prohibit “secret pardons,” and over the years the courts have found that the President’s authority to issue pardons for federal offenses is pretty much unlimited. If you were, say, Dick Cheney, and were concerned that you might be prosecuted after leaving office, you could ask your friend Dubya to issue you a pardon but not publicize it. You could keep it in your breast pocket until you were indicted, and decide only then to reveal it to the court.
I’ve never heard of anyone actually getting a secret pardon, though, and think they owe a lot more to 24 and Robert Ludlum than to the real world.
Since Darth Cheney is muttering about Scooter not getting a full pardon, we can probably cross his name off the Double-Secret-Pardon list.
As was pointed out on Countdown last night, such pardons will no longer be secret if their recipients feel a need to play their Get Out Of Jail Free card.
So how would one prove that the pardon actually HAPPENED before he left office? Does the pardon attorney get a copy? Could “I got pardoned suckas, neener neener neener” be challenged in court?
I can’t figure out how your question could be construed as “nasty”. :dubious:
ETA: Oh I understand. You are asking whether Elendil’s Heir really knew about secret pardons before he read your post. I didn’t understand that was what you were asking the first time around. The dash in your first sentence was hard to parse.
Secret pardons have been discussed at least since Nixon’s final days in the White House, but have not, as I wrote, ever been issued to my knowledge. As to confirming that one was issued while the President still had the authority to do so, I assume you’d want it witnessed by a couple of Administration loyalists who would be sworn to secrecy unless and until the recipient of the pardon revealed it, at which point they could testify that yes, the President issued the pardon while he was still in office.