Our pardon mess

GEORGE FREY/GETTY IMAGES

The Trump administration is poised to end largely as it began: as a self-dealing pageant of executive impunity. Even as President Donald Trump conducts his scorched-earth effort to overturn a national election he lost by a historic margin, he’s resumed doing what he does best—rigging the administration of justice to reward his most loyal cronies and enablers.

A gruesome augur of likely things to come in the remaining weeks of his presidency was Trump’s pardon of disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, convicted on charges of lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sidestepping sanctions stemming from Russia’s tampering with the 2016 presidential election. The Flynn pardon is scandalous on the face of things, New Republic staff writer Matt Ford notes—but more than that, it reflects Trump’s long-standing “war on the rule of law.” And like many of his other excesses and abuses, Trump’s abuse of the pardon power draws on a troubling set of precedents laid down by his recent predecessors in office. While Trump’s “pardons are a final act of revenge against a system he couldn’t control,” Ford writes, they’re also expressions of creeping corruption within that system. “Trump … seems set on building upon the ignominious history that surrounds a litany of controversial applications of the president’s ‘get out of jail free’ card,” Ford observes. Just consider the recent record of lame-duck presidential pardons:

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Even if you accept that Gerald Ford’s “full, free, and unconditional” pardon of Richard Nixon was granted in good faith, it arguably nourished a sense of elite impunity that’s still keenly felt on both sides of the aisle in Washington today. Subsequent presidents only contributed to the seaminess of the privilege. On Christmas Eve in 1992, lame-duck President George H.W. Bush pardoned former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and other indicted conspirators in the Iran-Contra scandal before they could go to trial. Bill Clinton doled out pardons to Democratic financiers, political allies, and even his own brother in the final moments of his presidency. George W. Bush commuted a White House aide’s conviction on charges that emerged from the Valerie Plame scandal. And even for pardons and commutations without the swamplike undertones, the well-heeled and well-connected seem to receive them at a disproportionate level compared to less affluent convicts with more convincing claims of being wronged by the judicial system.

Even before the looming final days of his presidency, Trump had gone into full lackey-rewarding mode, handing out criminal pardons to feckless ideologues like Dinesh D’Souza, convicted and sentenced on campaign finance charges, and Conrad Black, the right-wing Canadian media baron turned convicted mail fraudster. And Trump’s pardon of campaign adviser Roger Stone—still another apparatchik facing charges of lying (to Congress this time) about the 2016 campaign’s Russia ties—was a corruption-on-steroids move, releasing Stone from charges stemming from “criminal actions from which the president himself had benefited,” Ford writes.

So Trump’s dismal record of pardoning abuses is now on track with the ugly history of lame-duck presidential pardons—which means that things are likely to get uglier still. We’ve already seen reports that the president is pondering preemptive pardons for his personal lawyer and would-be coup mastermind, Rudy Giuliani, together with his own exuberantly self-dealing children. And just to dispel any lingering doubt as to where the political logic of all this executive corruption leads, Michael Flynn has seen fit to repay Trump’s impunity in kind, by endorsing the plea from the delusionally militant (and epically misnamed) Trumpist group We the People for Maximum Leader Trump to get on with it already and overturn the 2020 election by instituting martial law.

The executive pardon power has often served, in Anglo-American law, to rectify genuine miscarriages of justice—but it’s clear, based on Trump’s crowning disfigurements of its intent, that some basic legislative reforms are urgently in order, starting with Congress’s proposal to designate the executive pardon a “thing of value” under federal bribery law. More far-reaching curbs on pardon abuses would involve a constitutional amendment—or what’s even more far-fetched, Ford contends, the mandate for “the American people to always elect decent people to the presidency.” Barring that, we should take a long and hard look at the parting legacy of the Oval Office’s present, and deeply indecent, inhabitant.

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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