The Weekly Sift

Throughout his administration, Donald Trump has tested the limits of presidential power. On his way out the door, he is testing the limits of the pardon power.

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This week the Covid pandemic reached new heights and threatened to break America’s hospital system. The total number of American deaths will soon pass the number of combat deaths in World War II.

So of course the White House had not a word to say about any of that. Instead, the President’s attention was absorbed by more pressing problems: the continuing failure of his attempts to overturn the election he lost by seven million votes, and the criminal exposure he and various members of his family and his administration might face come January 21, when he no longer has the power to restrain the career investigators and prosecutors in the Department of Justice.

The first of the expected rush of lame-duck pardons was given to former national security advisor Michael Flynn. Signed the day before Thanksgiving, the text was only released last Monday. [1] Since then, Trump is reported to be discussing pardons for his children, up to 20 members and allies of his administration, and himself. [2]

All of that may yet come to nothing; Trump frequently is said to be thinking about some action that never happens (like releasing a healthcare plan). But given the approaching deadline, it’s worth considering what he can actually do.

Article II. The President’s power to pardon is established in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution:

The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

That sounds pretty sweeping, but as so often is the case in constitutional law, nearly every word inspires entire articles of analysis. That said, there is one clear limit that just about everyone agrees on: “Offenses against the United States” means federal crimes only. So a presidential pardon won’t protect against prosecutions for violating state laws, or against civil lawsuits.

That’s relevant, because a lot of the post-presidency legal exposure faced by Trump and his family falls outside of his pardon power. He could, for example, try to pardon himself for the seven instances of obstruction of justice that the Mueller report found to be indictable. But if he is guilty of bank and tax fraud (as Michael Cohen has claimed), New York state laws have been violated, and the alleged misappropriation of funds contributed to the Trump Inaugural Committee is a civil suit.

Self-pardons. But that brings up the issue of a self-pardon, which is untested in American law because no previous president has ever tried such a thing. Examined naively, the Article II text would seem to support the idea; it just says “power to grant pardons” with no exceptions other than impeachment.

But North Carolina Law Professor Eric Muller has an interesting interpretation, which ought to appeal to the conservatives on the Supreme Court who claim [3] to believe in Originalism: He can’t find 18th-century usages of grant as a reflexive verb. In other words, one party “grants” something to another; but nobody ever “grants” something to himself.

in the time period from 1750 to 1800 … [t]ransitive uses of the verb—“grant me,” “grant him,” “grant her,” “grant us,” “grant you,” and the like, where the person receiving the grant is different from the person doing the granting—are all common. But reflexive uses, where the person doing the granting is also the person on the receiving end? All but nonexistent.

Leading to the conclusion:

Can Donald Trump pardon himself? Perhaps, but that’s not the question the Constitution requires us to ask. Can Donald Trump grant himself a pardon? The evidence, at least according to the text of the Constitution and its original meaning, says no.

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe made a similar point to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, and added that Article II also stipulates that the President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”. If presidents could pardon themselves, they would instead be exempt from all federal laws — something the Framers clearly did not intend. The King of England might be above the law, but the President of the United States should not be.

We know that the Framers did not bother saying that the president cannot grant himself a pardon, because no one in their right mind would have imagined otherwise.

Specificity. Another problem of constitutional interpretation involves the word pardon itself. What did the Framers think it meant? University of California Law Professor Alan Rappaport argues that the Framers would have seen a pardon as a very specific reprieve from a specific violation of the law.

Most importantly, the Framers would have understood that pardons must be issued for specific crimes. They were not intended to be broad grants of immunity, get-out-of-jail-free cards bestowed by presidential grace.

This would call into question the Flynn pardon, which mentions the specific crime he pled guilty to (lying to the FBI), but also claims to cover

any and all possible offenses arising out of facts and circumstances known to, identified by, or in any manner related to the investigation of the Special Counsel, including, but not limited to, any grand jury proceedings in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia or the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Can such a “broad grant of immunity” really be valid, when President Trump himself may not know exactly what crimes he has put beyond the reach of legal accountability?

The model for this pardon, and for similar pardons Trump is said to be planning for his family and associates, is President Ford’s pardon of former President Nixon, which granted

a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.

Well OK, then: If Nixon’s pardon is valid, then Flynn’s should be also. But is Nixon’s pardon valid? It was respected, in the sense that nobody put Nixon on trial. But precisely because Nixon’s pardon was never challenged, no judge has ever ruled on its validity.

So if Flynn has committed some crime “related to the investigation of the Special Counsel”, but not specifically identified in his pardon, the next Attorney General will have the option to indict him for it. During the subsequent trial, Flynn could ask the judge to throw out the indictment, because he had already been pardoned. But that motion would have to make its way up to the Supreme Court, because there is no compelling legal precedent for a lower-court judge to cite.

Trump family members might find themselves involved in some similar proceeding. If, say, Don Jr. gets a pardon vaguely immunizing him from anything he may or may not have done, what happens if he is prosecuted for lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If vague, sweeping pardons aren’t valid, Trump’s other option is to list the crimes his children and close associates might be prosecuted for. While this would quite likely be legally valid, it would essentially be an admission of guilt. Such pardons would start to resemble the truth-and-reconciliation model, where crimes committed by an outgoing regime are excused in exchange for a full accounting of them.

Can a pardon itself be a crime? Yes. In his Senate confirmation hearing, Bill Barr admitted that offering a pardon in exchange for false testimony, or for refusing to testify, would be obstruction of justice.

So while the pardon itself might be valid, the President might commit a new crime by granting it.

In his recent book Where Law Ends, Mueller investigation veteran Andrew Weissmann says that Trump’s public praise of Paul Manafort (in particular for refusing to “break” by cooperating with the Mueller investigation, in contrast to Michael Cohen, whom Trump characterized as a “rat“) amounted to dangling a pardon in exchange for his silence. George Packer’s review of Weissman’s book summarizes:

[Manafort’s] lies were encouraged by the president, who made sympathetic noises about Manafort with the suggestion that stonewalling might earn him a pardon. Trump’s pardon power was an obstacle that the prosecutors didn’t anticipate and could never overcome. It kept them from being able to push uncooperative targets as hard as in an ordinary criminal case.

Similarly, the Flynn pardon and the commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence could be interpreted as obstruction.

Side-effects of pardons. Even if Trump’s family and associates have valid pardons, Congress may decide that it wants to know what happened during the various events they might have been prosecuted for. (What exactly was Rudy doing in Ukraine, anyway? When Flynn talked to the Russian ambassador, what instructions, if any, had Trump given him?) So the pardon recipients might be called to testify before congressional committees.

If they are called, they will have no Fifth-Amendment rights to invoke, because they can’t be prosecuted for crimes that have already been pardoned. If they refuse to testify without invoking a valid privilege, they can be cited for contempt of Congress (which a Biden-appointed US attorney might see fit to prosecute). If they testify and lie, that would be a new crime not covered by their pardons.

Not the end of the story. Ordinarily, a pardon is the end of the story: You did something; you were accused and possibly convicted of it; but a pardon wiped the slate clean and the credits roll.

The pardons Trump is considering, on the other hand, might just be another link in the chain of events. Depending on what Biden’s appointments at the Department of Justice decide [4], investigations and prosecutions could still happen, and the Supreme Court would have some important decisions to make.

And whatever the courts decide, Congress could still investigate, and Trump’s various obstructions of justice could still unravel.

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[1] Combined with the previous commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence, the Flynn pardon ties up one of the few remaining loose ends in Trump’s obstruction of the Mueller investigation. The only remaining loose end is Paul Manafort, who quite likely will get his own pardon soon. The 2016 Trump campaign connected to Russia in three main ways, and the Mueller investigation ran aground when it couldn’t get the cooperation of Manafort, Stone, and Flynn.

Paul Manafort was the head of the 2016 Trump campaign until he resigned under fire that August. His associate Konstantin Kilimnik turned out to be a Russian agent. Manafort passed campaign polling data to Kilimnik, for reasons that have never been explained.

The emails that Russia hacked from the Democratic National Committee were given to WikiLeaks. Trump associate Roger Stone appeared to have advance knowledge of what was in them and when they would be released. How the Russia-WikiLeaks-Stone-Trump pipeline worked has never been explained.

Michael Flynn was convicted of lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the Obama-to-Trump transition. Flynn and Jared Kushner reportedly were trying to set up a “back channel” to Russia that would circumvent US intelligence agencies. What that was for and what Trump knew about it has never been explained.

[2] Just a suggestion: Don’t forget Melania, Don. You do not want her flipping on you.

[3] I think Originalism is a rhetorical device they use when it’s convenient, not set of principles they actually believe. One key example: There is no way the Framers intended the Bill of Rights to apply to corporations.

[4] So far, Biden and Harris have been saying exactly the right things: Whether or not to prosecute Trump-administration crimes will be decided by the Justice Department, which will regain its independence from political meddling.

Our Justice Department is going to operate independently on those issues, how to respond to any of that. I am not going to be telling them what they have to do and don’t have to do. I am not going to be saying, go prosecute, A, B, or C.

Biden is even said to be planning to keep Christoper Wray as head of the FBI. If Wray’s FBI finds evidence of Trump-era crimes, Biden will not have his fingerprints on those reports.