As I’m sure you all know, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime friend Roger Stone on seven felony crimes. Yeah, he corruptly used the power of his office to let a co-conspirator off the hook.
In the words of judge Amy Berman, the judge who sentenced Stone, “Mr. Stone was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the President. He was prosecuted for covering up for the President.”
In a recent public statement, Stone said of Trump: “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.” Basically, Stone didn’t give incriminating evidence against Trump, and felt he deserved reward.
What has happened, in the words of NYU law professor Ryan Goodman is that the pardon (commuting of the sentence) has become part of the coverup.
Self-Pardon or pardoning a co-conspirator would be a violation of Article II, Section 3, which directs that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” (See this explainer.)
“Self-pardoning” or pardoning your closest associates for self-interested reasons violates the fiduciary law of public office.
The question is how to challenge a corruptly issued pardon or sentence commutation. I would assume that Congress can challenge the pardon, or demand an investigation.
The judge presiding over Roger Stone’s case could, likewise, demand briefing on whether the sentence commutation was corruptly issued. If she invalidated the commutation, Roger Stone would take the challenge up the Supreme Court.
After the Mazars and Vance decisions issued earlier in the week, it’s clear the Court would rule against the President on the same grounds as Mazars and Vance: Allowing for self-pardon or the corrupt pardon of co-conspirators would place the President above the law.
The Supreme Court has already told us that they just are not buying the notion of an imperial presidency.
A subscriber to the blog asked:
No, there have been no attempts to repeal the pardon power.
To understand what the framers had in mind, we have to put ourselves back into the 18th century. Criminal justice was crude. There was no enormous federal prison sentence. Offenders were generally executed. You’d think that the routine punishments violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, but alas, it was a different era. 18th-century punishments included stuff like hanging, branding, whipping, and the law seldom allowed for exceptions.
Hamilton said the purpose was to mitigate the cruelty of criminal punishments in “unfortunate” cases. “In Federalist Paper #74, he wrote: “The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.”
The Justice Department has given criteria and procedures for pardons and sentence commutations, which includes post-conviction conduct, acceptance of responsibility, remorse and atonement, need for relief, official recommendations and reports.
The very idea that a president should step in and pardon a co-conspirator to keep him from incriminating the president is obviously absurd.
Impeach Again?
The utter corruption of the sentence commutation has led to more outcries of “Impeach!”
The drafters of the Constitution included a way to remove a president who pardons or commutes the sentence of an individual engaged in a cover-up campaign to shield that President from criminal prosecution. The problem is that GOP Senators are shielding him.
Removing Trump from office early can (and will) happen if (or when) GOP Senators stop shielding him. That’s a constitutional reality.
My view: The GOP Senators will stop shielding him when his support craters (probably below 30%).
Right now his approval average is about 40%, but his handling of the virus is lower. It appears that his overall approval is still dropping.
I don’t think the corrupt commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence will move the needle much. People who dislike Trump will dislike him more. His Fox-viewing base believes that the Mueller Investigation was a hoax and that Trump was mitigating corruption in pardoning Stone. Not much will penetrate that bubble
However, the virus is heading us toward a cliff (mass graves and triaging) that could cause his support crater. The second part of the tragedy is that it would take a mass tragedy for his support to crater.
There is only so far you can lie. When your local hospitals set up tents and tell you that a person you love cannot be saved because other younger and healthier patients need the equipment, a lie cannot cover this up.
It’s easy. McConnell marches over to Pelosi’s office, and says, “OK, we’re done with him.” Pelosi has articles of impeachment drawn up. Roger Stone is yet another example of using the powers of presidency corruptly for personal gain. There are dozens.
Articles of Impeachment while the Senate is still supporting Trump would be a waste of time, and (in my view) makes sense only if it can be done quickly without taking time away from handling a global pandemic that is about to devastate parts of the country.
Certainly. Actually, that’s not a bad idea. His term doesn’t end until January 20. After the election, the Senators will have nothing to lose. Notice that we’re talking about a corrupt party putting power and self-interest first. But that’s another rant.
Nixon resigned when the Republican Senators told him that they’d no longer support him. That’s really the key, and where I started. If the Republican Senators say they’ve had enough, he’d done. He’d be convicted in a trial and forever disgraced.
I think it’s a lose-lose situation for them. Trump controls the GOP “base.” They can’t win without that base. They’d never get enough Democrats to balance out the loss of those GOP voters if Trump turns on them. As of now, their only hope of winning is to retain Trump’s base and peel off enough support from the independents. The pandemic is making it impossible to win the support of anything other than the hardcore base. So lose-lose.
But if members of the “base” start understanding that they were lied to and led over a cliff, and that the Trump-Fox-GOP has brought mass death and suffering (in a palpable way) to their community, that could change.
That’s a good question. I think somewhere between 25 – 35%. Bush and Nixon both went to the mid-20s, so that’s rock bottom. Bush went that low and he had Fox, but Bush didn’t have the kind of control over the base that Trump has.
If nothing is done to stop what is coming in Texas, Florida, and Arizona, I think everything could be upended. The closest historical analogy is the Great Depression. People will know who lied to them.
