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From campaign associates to family members – and even perhaps himself – Trump could use his vast power of pardon to try to sort out legal matters on his way out of his home.
Perhaps the biggest looming pardon question is whether Trump will consider granting himself a pardon, amid state investigations into his affairs and finances and the prospect of federal investigators examining him. after he left.
Trump has been asking his aides since 2017 if he can forgive himself, former aides told CNN. A former White House official said Trump had asked about self-pardons as well as forgiveness for his family. Trump even asked if he could grant preventive pardons for things that people could be charged with in the future, the former official said.
“Once he heard about it, he was obsessed with the power of forgiveness,” the official said. “I always thought he liked that too because it was a way of helping him.”
Former Trump aides are divided over whether Trump would actually consider forgiving himself. Some see it as a virtual certainty – “Of course he will,” the former official said – while others think it’s unlikely, as it would imply he is guilty of something.
A highly personal process
To date, Trump’s presidential pardon record is – like much of the rest of his presidency – marked by personal connections, a sense of spectacle, and an aversion to going through official government channels.
The Office of the Clemency Attorney, a Justice Department bureaucracy that is generally active in reviewing clemency requests, has been left out of Trump’s very personal process of deciding pardons, playing a role in only eight of the 27 pardons issued by Trump, according to a spokeswoman.
Instead, recipients have earned leniency by directing their demands to Trump through friends, Fox News figures, or Hollywood celebrities who speak to the president. This unusual pipeline has worked for people like Joe Arpaio, former Arizona Sheriff, Dinesh D’Souza, right-wing commentator, and Michael Milken, a financier convicted of securities fraud.
Trump’s arrangement is likely to benefit people close to the president who are already on his radar because he claims they have been unfairly targeted for prosecution.
Former Trump campaign associates who were convicted as a result of Special Advocate Robert Mueller’s investigation are among the most likely to benefit: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort and others. Trump has long claimed that he and his campaign were illegally targeted, and that campaign associates got into trouble only because of their association with him.
Several officials have said Flynn – whose guilty plea to Mueller is being continued after the Justice Department tried to dismiss him earlier this year – would be at the top of Trump’s pardon list.
Trump has already suspended pardons for witnesses who testified before the special advocate, including Manafort and Flynn, and Mueller’s report detailed Trump’s public discussion of pardons in the volume on possible obstruction of justice.
The White House declined to comment on the matter.
An ‘absolute right’
The legal team and Trump administration officials played down the prospect. There is no precedent for doing so, and the constitutionality of such a pardon has not been constitutionally tested, with legal scholars divided over whether it would be legitimate.
The Justice Department looked into the issue during the Nixon era and concluded that it was not within the president’s power to forgive himself. “By virtue of the fundamental rule that no one can be a judge in his own case, the president cannot forgive himself,” wrote the Office of the Legal Counsel in August 1974.
The OLC memo laid out other possibilities that Trump could avail himself of: he could declare himself temporarily unable to perform his presidential duties, authorizing the vice president to act as president, including granting him a pardon, then the president could resume his functions. as president, or resign. The OLC memo also said Congress could pass a legislative pardon.
Several people familiar with the matter said that despite the president’s interest, the White House council office under Don McGahn, Ty Cobb and Emmet Flood did not investigate the matter and did not see it as a serious possibility. .
“He asked for stuff all the time – ask everyone that,” one person said.
A former official said Trump was so enthralled with his powers of grace that senior officials would sometimes bring up their research on the issue just to steer Trump away from another topic they wanted to get away from.
There is a precedent for preventive pardon: Former President Gerald Ford pardoned former President Richard Nixon after his resignation. But another former senior White House official warned against the idea of Trump giving himself a pardon because it would suggest that he had done something criminal that required it.
Another reason it was less likely, the official said, was that a pardon would only apply to alleged federal criminal behavior – meaning it wouldn’t bar the state attorney general from New York or the Manhattan district attorney to investigate him.
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