Trump Invites More Criminal Acts By Promising Pardons To Everyone Who Works For Him
from the make-America-unaccountable-again dept
If you’re not corrupt, you generally don’t have to say certain things.
Let’s take a look at ex-NYC mayor Eric Adams who, while dealing with plenty of corruption investigations and allegations, protested his innocence by saying stuff no one who wasn’t hip deep in corruption would ever say:
“Investigators have not indicated to us the mayor or his staff are targets of any investigation,” the mayor’s chief counsel, Lisa Zornberg, said in a statement. “As a former member of law enforcement, the mayor has repeatedly made clear that all members of the team need to follow the law.”
This isn’t something that’s nuanced or complex. Most people in any supervisory position never need to tell their subordinates to not break the law. It’s the lowest of low bars that doesn’t even deserve comment, much less “repeatedly.” On the rare occasion that someone does break the law, you may want to reinforce this concept.
But this statement suggests a lot of people working for the mayor really wanted to break the law, but were perhaps occasionally deterred by the “repeated” reminder that breaking the law wasn’t acceptable. Not that this repeated reminder worked. Plenty of people in Mayor Adams’ orbit were subjects of law enforcement investigations. So, this exhortation seems less like a deterrent and more like the laziest form of plausible deniability.
Which brings us to Trump, who is saying things no one who generally expects officials in his administration to get through their careers without breaking laws would ever need to say.
President Trump has repeatedly promised his top administration officials pardons before he leaves office, according to people who have heard his comments.
“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval,” Trump said in a recent meeting to laughs, according to people with knowledge of the comments. That radius appears to be expanding as the president repeats the line. Another person who met with Trump earlier this year said the president quipped about pardoning anyone who had come within 10 feet.
In one conversation with advisers in the dining room next to the Oval Office last year, Trump said he would host a news conference and announce mass pardons before he left office, some of the people said.
It’s not just a question of “why would you say that?” It’s also a question of “why would you feel the need to say that?”
We already know Trump isn’t afraid to use his pardon powers to reward supporters and financial benefactors. His mass pardon of January 6 insurrectionists was startling in its transparent self-interest. Trump now appears to be offering pre-emptive pardons, which is only going to encourage his officials to break more laws and engage in more open corruption, now that they’ve been assured they’ll never be punished for it.
Of course, the White House front mouth has applied some spin to a statement Trump has already made at least twice:
“The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke, however, the President’s pardon power is absolute,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said.
That deflection is just as damning as Trump’s own statements. Even if he’s just making a joke (something that’s almost impossible to believe since Trump seems incapable of humor, much less self-deprecating humor), it’s an incredibly stupid joke to make when he’s already abused this power to pardon a group of people who committed federal crimes in hopes of illegally elevating him to the position of president despite losing the election.
This “it’s just a joke” deflection is further undercut by the press secretary’s next words: Trump’s “pardon power is absolute.” That says that even if Trump isn’t joking, these pardons are going to happen and no one can stop them from happening.
That’s what really matters here. Trump has nothing to fear from anyone. The Supreme Court has already blessed a lot of his theories of absolute executive power. The only thing stopping Trump from pardoning people who commit crimes on his behalf is shame, and he’s entirely devoid of that human quality.
We can already see the scorched earth this political party will leave behind if it’s forced from office in the next election. All we can hope is that Trump fails to follow through with his pardon threat, allowing a bunch of loyalists to be punished for his actions. And that end result is all but assured. Trump has fired plenty of loyalists and yet still has people willing to be thrown under the bus for the cause. Wait, that’s not entirely accurate. Trump is surrounded by loyalists who are willing to ask where each bus is located and when they should lie down under the wheels.
Of course, this is all win-win for Trump. If he doesn’t pardon anyone, those punished for enabling him will be treated as martyrs. And if he does wipe the slate clean as he exits the Oval Office, he’ll once again escape the accountability that is supposed to come with the position. Given what’s been said by Trump, I’d expect his underlings to amp up their illegal efforts. When you have nothing to lose but your soul, it makes sense to sell it while it’s still a seller’s market.
Filed Under: corruption, donald trump, executive power, pardons, supreme court, trump administration
Comments on “Trump Invites More Criminal Acts By Promising Pardons To Everyone Who Works For Him”
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Biden pardoned or commuted the sentences of EIGHT THOUSAND PEOPLE (including some really nasty serial killers)
Nothing you say means anything.
If shitlibs didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have any standards at all.
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Only off by two orders of magnitude, dumbass.
He pardoned only 80 people during his entire term. He did commutations on over 4k, but that’s still way less than the 8k you claimed. And also, while you talk about “serial killers” you leave out that his commutations for people were to change them from death row to life imprisonment. It’s not like he set them free.
You’re REALLY bad at this.
Also, Trump’s pardons are almost all political to people who suck up to him. Biden’s were not.
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And so far as I know, Biden’s only preëmptive pardon was for his son Hunter, and that was only for crimes Hunter might have committed so the Trump regime couldn’t maliciously prosecute Hunter out of petty political revenge. I can’t even fault Joe for that one. A decent father would absolutely protect his son like that.
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Biden preemptively pardoned Schiff and a bunch of other Trump impeachment people after Trump promised retribution on the campaign trail.
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Ah, yes. Just remembered that when I had to look up Fauci’s pardon for a different comment on a different article. My brain isn’t what it used to brain.
She should be required, each time she says the equivalent of “it’s just a joke”, to actually explain the joke.
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Are you familiar with the Watchmen character called The Comedian? A fascist thug (working for Nixon) who never does anything remotely funny:
I assume it’s something like that. “Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian’s the only thing that makes sense.”
I don’t know about that “only”: it might also get judges and legal scholars motivated to find ways to punish those people. Sure, the ICE thugs kidnapping in D.C. and Puerto Rico might get off scot-free, but a lot of such activity is happening within states, and a federal pardon doesn’t work for state crimes.
We’ve already got plenty of federal judges saying some of the stuff these people are doing is not legal; it follows that the criminals are not then acting as “agents”, and can maybe be prosecuted as individuals. Few judges have yet advanced past the “writing very angry screeds” stage, but I think we may see it build up to something more over the remainder of the term.
Ignoring the fact that, as I understand it, he can only pardon federal crimes, this is also a useful bit of leverage. A pardon promised can also be withheld, so anyone leaving the administration has a very strong incentive to keep quiet and stay loyal, no matter how they have been treated.
Republicans just hate it when the law is enforced.
How exactly do you reinforce the concept without saying it? There’s two parts to accountability. Telling people the rules and noting down that they have officially been made aware is one of them. The other half is following through on the described consequences for transgression.
As anyone who has spent any amount of time in corporate America can tell you, all those quarterly/annual/etc trainings sound really dumb and obvious. Of course you should not sexually harass your coworkers. Of course you should not come to work drunk. Of course you should not do various and sundry criminal activity. But these trainings show up at two particular times: Regularly to make sure absolutely no one can say they didn’t know it was wrong, and then again right after something happens, to make it extra clear because apparently, to some, it wasn’t obvious.
I don’t object in any way to various government officials saying that everyone in their office must follow the law. That’s good. It requires follow through though.
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According to Trump, that is not accountability but treason, punishable by death.
Don’t you wish I were joking? I too.
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I thought those were trainings on how to fast track your career to CEO/President.
Trump is exposing a lot of issues the founders didn’t necessarily foresee.
Granted they’d likely have been mortified at the idea he could be elected once, let alone twice.
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Didn’t George Washington bemoan the idea of political parties?
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Yes, and also bullshit grouping more generally. Here’s the (PDF) text of the Farewell Address covering that. I feel like someone read it as a how-to manual.
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I am familiar with jokes e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KivCRqfFcqY
Also, I cant say I am unsympathetic to the idea that people who don’t understand such jokes deserve a pardon
You either have those who are openly corrupt (Trump) or those who are “secretly” corrupt (Biden). And why not? Their bases will cover for them and hardly anyone ever gets punished. All of these jokers are corrupt to the core especially when it comes to selective prosecutions and pardons.
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“secretly corrupt” as in “we haven’t been able to find evidence that would hold up to any legal standard”.
And with regard to political prosecution, comparing the Merrick Garland DOJ to the Bill Barr DOJ in that respect is a joke, and comparing it to the Bondi/Blanche DOJ is an insult to intelligence.
How do pardons work exactly?
If the US still exists, if we’re still allowed to vote and we manage to elect a not terrible president in the future can they just nope past presidential pardons? Or maybe can a functional DOJ go to the courts and ask the pardons be vacated because dear leader couldn’t have given each the necessary due consideration?
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No. The Founders did not foresee the amount of corruption Americans are willing to knowingly vote for.
You’d need to pass amendments to the Constitution to fix that, requiring supermajorities that you will not get from the party that in its less dirty past threatened to get Nixon removed from office for things that look like child’s play compared to what Trump openly gets away with.
To be fair, there was erosion of separation of powers and presidential authority continuing throughout the Obama administration (the 09/11 inspired Patriot Act under Bush II was a watershed moment before that) as well, preceding the total collapse of the rule of law under Trump II. There really never was a wholesale reversal of giving up major parts of the founding principles of the U.S. more than 20 years ago.
Neither party has had the interest or at least the guts to permanently lock off executive access to the cookie jar of power.
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See George Washington’s warnings (“Farewell Address”) in one of the other comments. As foresight goes, that seems pretty damn accurate.
The founders are also said to have “hotly debated” the pardon power. Wikipedia says “The pardon power was controversial from the outset; many Anti-Federalists [a misnomer] remembered examples of royal abuses of the pardon power in Europe, and warned that the same would happen in the new republic.”
And: “famous revolutionary figures such as Patrick Henry came out publicly against the Constitution. They argued that the strong national government proposed by the Federalists was a threat to the rights of individuals and that the president would become a king.”
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The Founding Fathers built guardrails into the government to provide the fabled checks and balances between the three branches so no one branch overpowered the other. But they never conceived of a legislature and a judiciary both willing to cede their authority and power to the president so all three branches could turn the United States into an autocratic theocracy designed to bring about the End Times.
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On the contrary, the quoted statements and many others (including “a republic, if you can keep it”) suggest they were well aware of the risk that their proposed protections could be insufficient—and specifically considered a political party becoming too powerful.
Perhaps they “misunderestimated” the risk, or didn’t expect the public to be so complicit, but they certainly conceived of various ways things could go wrong. It’s too bad they were never able to agree on a fix; then again, even today we don’t quite know how to fix things. (The proposal, noted below, of letting the house and senate have input on pardons aims at only one small part of the general problem. And wouldn’t work, anyway, with the current members who mostly vote along party lines.)
Re: Re: How do pardons work exactly?
David:
Thank you for answering my question about pardons. I disagree about why it is the way it is. The founders lived in a world of corruption.
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Just recently a Constitutional Amendment was proposed that would allow a 2/3 majority of both the House and the Senate to override a pardon.
How many honest
Politicians have you seen?
Then how many Survived a smear campaign?
The commentators wouldn’t need to say it?
Again, I highly recommend changing something in how your editing process works. It’s clearly running into issues, to an extent that wasn’t present 5 or 10 years ago.