Should Joe Biden pardon Donald Trump, and would he?
Biden is sending the message that he doesn’t want DOJ investigating Trump, which for all intents and purposes is a de facto pardon.
Michael Conway, former Democratic counsel to the US House Judiciary Committee investigating the Nixon impeachment, recently argued in favor of Joe Biden pardoning Donald Trump.
At the same time, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, says that Biden won’t be telling the Justice Department what to do, in terms of investigating Trump and his soon-to-be-former officials:
That’s good, right? Not so fast. Biden isn’t simply telegraphing that, unlike Trump, he won’t try to bend the Justice Department to his political will. According to one report, Biden is also sending the message that he doesn’t want DOJ investigating Trump at all.
President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn't want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration.
Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations.
They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he "just wants to move on."
I worry that even if Biden won’t directly order his DOJ to give Trump a pass, the message has already been sent: Investigations of Trump and his cronies are a distraction that the boss doesn’t want. And Trump gets his pardon de facto, if not de jure.
Joe Biden has a lot of Barack Obama in him: A desire to bring folks together, while not being terribly vengeful. And those are admirable traits. But just because Donald Trump wanted to improperly prosecute his political opponents, doesn’t mean that Trump should be immune from prosecution for legitimate crimes.
Trump’s reign has been uniquely corrupt in modern American history. And the corruption continues through Trump’s ongoing attempt to steal the election. Even if most experts think Trump’s coup won’t succeed, the example has been set. What happens when a future presidential election comes down to only one state in which the candidates are separated by a mere 537 votes, as they were in Florida back in 2000? Does anyone seriously believe that a future Trump, and his GOP enablers, won’t try this again, with a better chance of success next time?
There’s also the message that this sends to future presidents, and their staff, Democrat and Republican alike: You can violate US law with impunity, as long as you make things so bad that the next president, desperate to unify the country, has no choice but to give your crimes a pass. If anything, that provides an incentive for the next Trump to be even worse.
But even if the feds give Trump a pass, state prosecutions will hold him and his accountable, right? While state prosecutions are exempt from federal pardons — only governors can pardon violations of state law — what if Biden tries to sweeten the deal by leaning on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to throw a state pardon in the mix?
And whether a pardon is actually on Biden’s mind, Trump could still be angling for one as part of a quid pro quo for calling off the election-fraud dogs. Trump is notorious for attempting to renegotiate the terms of deals he no longer likes, even when — hell, especially when — he’s losing. Might Trump try to weasel a Biden-Cuomo pardon in exchange for finally and convincingly conceding?
I get Biden’s desire to bring the country together, and I laud it. I’m just not sure it’s going to happen. Even were Biden to pardon Trump, Trump isn’t going away — he’s talking about running again in 2024, and he’ll be tweeting away as shadow-president, organizing and enraging the Republican grassroots with conspiracy after conspiracy, for years to come.
No pardon will cure Trump’s narcissism. He is going to be a syphilitic sore on the body politic until the day he dies. We’re going to have to deal with him at some point. Let it be now.
I really do love New York:
