Dec.03

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

The Pardon Is the Purest Form of Raw Power

Most forms of power granted by the Constitution have some check on them. Congress can pass bills, but the president can veto them. The president can nominate judges, but the Senate can refuse to confirm them. The Supreme Court routinely strikes down laws (although it has no explicit constitutional authority to do so), but Congress can limit the Court's appellate jurisdiction, and so on.

But one power has no counterbalance: the pardon power. There is a fragment of one sentence in the Constitution about it. Art. I, Sec. 2 contains this sentence fragment listing the powers of the president: "he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment." That's it. This power was clearly an afterthought, added to allow the president to rectify a situation when justice went awry. But Donald Trump has turned it into a major tool to encourage everyone around him to put loyalty to him above loyalty to the law.

The most recent example of Trump's use of the pardon power as a tool to enforce loyalty was his pardon of the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted last year of conspiring with cartels to pave a cocaine superhighway into the U.S. He was sentenced to 45 years. He claimed to have been persecuted by the Biden-Harris administration, and that was enough to spring him. When issuing the pardon, Trump forgot to mention that the lead prosecutor at the SDNY was Emil Bove. Trump liked Bove's work so much that he appointed him to a federal judgeship.

Hernández is by no means the only high-profile criminal Trump has pardoned. It has become a veritable assembly line of Trump-friendly criminals. Here are some more:

• Rudy Giuliani: This pardon is somewhat symbolic because Trump's former lawyer Giuliani was never charged with a federal crime in conjunction with Trump trying to steal the 2020 election. Still, it (probably) means he can never be charged with a crime in that context, although the Supreme Court has never dealt with a pardon issued before an indictment. Still, it sends a message to everyone that if you work to help Trump commit a crime he will pardon you if he can. Giuliani may yet go on trial in Arizona, though, and that is beyond the reach of a presidential pardon.
  
  
• Mark Meadows: Everything that applies to Giuliani also applies to Trump's one-time chief of staff Meadows.
  
  
• "George Santos": The disgraced congressman was convicted of defrauding donors and also lying to the House. He was given a 7-year sentence, but Trump sprang him from prison after 3 months.
  
  
• Ross Ulbricht: He was sometimes called "Dread Pirate Roberts," but whatever name he used, he founded the black-market website Silk Road that was used to facilitate all manner of drug transactions, money laundering, and other criminal activities. He was convicted and sentenced to life plus 40 years and a fine of over $180 million. He was Trump's kind of guy, so he got a pardon.
  
  
• Paul Walczak: The former nursing home executive went to prison for tax-related crimes. Then Trump held a $1-million-per-person fundraising dinner with rubber chicken at Mar-a-Lago. Walczak couldn't attend—as he was a guest of Uncle Sam at a different big house. Instead, his mom showed up at Mar-a-Lago and magically, less than a month later, Paul was a free man.
  
  
• Changpeng Zhao: The billionaire founder of the crypto giant Binance pleaded guilty to money laundering. Fortunately, his crypto empire has ties to Trump's crypto empire. That magic did it, and Zhao was pardoned, despite having admitted his guilt in court.

These are only a handful. There were many more, not to mention the 1,500 people convicted of crimes related to the coup attempt after the 2020 election. (V)