For defeated president, pardons express grievances
Flurry of 49 pardons, commutations illustrate leader using remaining power to strike back
The statement announcing the latest raft of presidential pardons was officially attributed to the White House press secretary, but it bristled with President Donald Trump’s own deep-seated grievances.
His friend and longtime adviser Roger Stone, the statement said, “was treated very unfairly” by prosecutors. His former campaign chairman Paul Manafort “is one of the most prominent victims of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American history.”
In complaining about “prosecutorial misconduct,” though, Trump seemed to be talking as much about himself as his allies. In the flurry of 49 pardons and commutations issued this week, he granted clemency to a host of convicted liars, crooked politicians and child-killing war criminals, but the throughline was a president who considers himself a victim of law enforcement and was using his power to strike back.
Never mind that Trump presents himself as a champion of “law and order.” He has been at war with the criminal justice system, at least when it has come to himself and his friends. And so in these final days in office, he is using the one all-but-absolute power vested in the presidency to rewrite the reality of his tenure by trying to discredit investigations into him and his compatriots and even absolving others he seems to identify with because of his own encounters with authorities.
In some ways this is the concession that Trump has otherwise refused to issue, an unspoken acknowledgment that he really did lose the Nov. 3 election. These are the kinds of clemency actions a president would take only shortly before leaving office.
But it also represents a final, angry exertion of power by a president who is losing his ability to shape events with each passing day, a statement of relevance even as Trump confronts the end of his dominance over the nation’s capital.
In the seven weeks since the election, he has screamed over and over that he actually won only to be dismissed by essentially every court and election authority that has considered his false assertions, which were also rejected by his own attorney general.
As power inexorably slips from his grasp, the defeated president finds his pardon authority to be the one weapon he can deploy without any checks. It is the most kingly of powers conferred on a president by the Constitution, one that is entirely up to his discretion, requires no confirmation by Congress or the courts and cannot be overturned.
Other presidents have been criticized for using it for political allies, particularly George H.W. Bush, who spared a half-dozen colleagues in the Iran-Contra investigation, and Bill Clinton, who granted clemency to his own half-brother, a former business partner and the former husband of a major donor.
But few if any have used their pardon power to attack the system in quite the way that Trump has.
Under Justice Department guidelines, pardons are normally not even considered until five years after an applicant completes a sentence and are “granted in recognition of the applicant’s acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct.”
But a president does not have to follow those guidelines, and Trump, famously dismissive or ignorant of norms, has largely dispensed with the Justice Department process for vetting clemency requests, treating them in many cases not as acts of forgiveness but assertions of vindication.
Additionally, the president this week pardoned three other figures convicted of lying in the Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller. They came on top of a similar pardon last month for Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and were part of an effort to erase what he has called a “hoax” inquiry.