My first exposure to the president’s power to pardon was when Ford pardoned Nixon. Which probably was good for the country. The next time I noticed it was when Carter pardoned the draft dodgers, which I supported and think was really helpful in healing the nation, if an imperfect act.
So I generally like the pardon. And mixed in with the political crap, every president, even Trump, has pardoned some people who deserved to be pardoned.
I’d like to see the power limited temporally, so the president couldn’t issue pardons after the last presidential election before he leaves office, perhaps. Something to reduce the lame-duck aspect of it. But I don’t want it to go away altogether.
He soaked his supporters who took the capitol, flat out betrayed them and threw them under the bus after they followed Trump’s command. And right after Trump said to them ‘we love you’
It was on the news last night here in DFW-- apparently they were hanging out outside the Federal pen medical facility in Fort Worth for a while waiting on a pardon yesterday.
One of my brothers is a lawyer who represented victims of one of the scam artists that Trump just commuted and he has followed the career of that scam artist pretty closely. He told me on Tuesday he was pretty sure the guy would be pardoned/commuted. Reason being that he had hired Dershowitz, and with Trump what counted was who was vouching for you.
I think Trump pardoned anyone who was convicted in connected to the Russia investigation because that’s behind him. But he is still facing impeachment over the election fraud shenanigans, so he was afraid to pardon anyone connected to that.
The comments here about Bannon would make sense if Trump and his supporters believe that Bannon ripped them off. But I doubt if that’s the case.
Did the norm-breaking president break one more on his way out the door, issuing pardons in secret to his friends, family or even himself, break-in-case-of-emergency documents to be produced if necessary?
In the heat of Watergate, The Post reported that “there is nothing in the federal regulations that requires public notification," paraphrasing Lawrence M. Traylor, the pardon attorney at the Justice Department. “The president could present himself with a written pardon during the next months, date it and quietly deposit it in a trust vault — ready to be pulled as a defense or waiver at any subsequent trial,” The Post noted, according to Traylor.
We may never know if Trump issued secret pardons in his final hours. If he did, he might have gambled too much on the likelihood that a court would one day recognize their validity.