Trump plans to forgive up to 20 associates: Politico

• President Donald Trump plans to preemptively forgive up to 20 close associates before stepping down in January, Politico reported Thursday.
• They include his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as well as his three eldest children, as the New York Times previously reported.
• However, the president is said to be concerned whether preventive pardons could resemble a public admission of guilt.
• Trump and his allies will face a series of civil and criminal investigations at the federal and state levels once he leaves office in January, and the pardon power does not apply to state offenses.
• Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump plans to issue preventive pardons to 20 close associates, Politico reported Thursday.

The New York Times reported earlier this week that those people included Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, along with his three eldest children – Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric – and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

That said, Trump questions whether the granting of pardons would resemble an admission of guilt, according to the Politico report. It is not unusual for a president to issue pardons and commutations in the last days of his term. But Trump has drawn particular scrutiny on his circumvention of Justice Department guidelines on executive pardoning grants, as well as his tendency to show mercy to his friends and allies.

The president and his entourage face nearly a dozen civil and criminal investigations, and Trump will be significantly more vulnerable when his presidential immunity expires at noon on January 20, when President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated.

Trump has expressed particular concern about a pair of fraud investigations being conducted by the New York attorney general’s office and the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Trump expressed some of those concerns in a 46-minute, conspiratorial rant he delivered from the White House earlier this week.

“Now I hear these same people who failed to get me to Washington sent all the information to New York so they could try to get me there,” Trump said. “It all happened over and over again.”

“They don’t want to shoot me, but us. And we can never let them do that,” he added.

Trump is probably more concerned with the New York investigations because, while the president’s pardon power is extraordinarily broad, it does not apply to state-level or local-level offenses. The two investigations – one civilian and one criminal – focus on the Trump family’s business relationships, the Trump organization, and the president’s personal finances. Manhattan prosecutors also hinted in a recent court filing that Trump may face a criminal tax investigation stemming from their investigation.

Giuliani, meanwhile, is the subject of a federal criminal investigation by the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan into whether he broke foreign lobbying laws through his work in Ukraine, as well as his role in the dismissal last year of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. . CNN reported that FBI agents in New York have contacted witnesses in recent weeks to ask questions about Giuliani’s work in Ukraine as well as possible ties to Russian intelligence.

Giuliani’s ties to Russian interests have been brought back into the spotlight in recent months after coordinating a widely discredited New York Post article claiming to show “steaming” emails between Biden’s son Hunter and a senior Burisma Holdings executive on setting up a meeting with Elder Biden when he was vice president in 2015.

Trump and his allies took to the story and said it was proof Joe Biden abused his power as vice president to shut down an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company of which Hunter Biden served. until recently.

As Business Insider has reported, these claims are baseless and have been debunked by testimonials, intelligence assessments, public comments, and media reports. NBC News also reported after the Post’s article was published that federal authorities were investigating whether the emails featured in the article, which the tabloid obtained from Giuliani, were part of a foreign influence operation. .

The news came amid revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that Russian agents were using Giuliani to channel disinformation into the White House. The Washington Post reported that Trump ignored the warnings and said, “It’s Rudy.”

Trump Jr., meanwhile, played a key role in Special Advocate Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. While campaigning for his father, Trump Jr. participated at a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with two Russian lobbyists who praised Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Kushner, followed by President of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort, also attended the meeting.

Federal law prohibits American campaigns from soliciting help from foreign governments or foreign nationals, but prosecutors decided not to indict Trump Jr. or others who attended the meeting because they believed he would. difficult to prove that participants knew their conduct was illegal, Mueller’s report told me.

The president’s eldest son was also accused by Democrats of lying to Congress about the nature of the meeting when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He has not been charged with any crime.

Kushner, for his part, was accused of misleading federal authorities about his contacts with foreign officials during a security clearance request, but he was granted one anyway. It has also drawn close scrutiny for its financial transactions and their inappropriate intersection with U.S. foreign policy.

Ivanka and Eric Trump were not trapped in Mueller’s investigation, but The Times reported that some of the tax write-offs the Manhattan prosecutor’s office is investigating in connection with the Trump organization appear to have been attributed to Ivanka.

The White House did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment, and representatives for Giuliani and Trump’s children did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Politico.