Trump eyes cases of Stewart, Blagojevich
President hasn’t stayed clear of using pardons
WASHINGTON — Presidents tend to save their most controversial pardons for their last months — and even their last hours — in office. But in granting the fifth pardon of his presidency Thursday to commentator Dinesh D’Souza, President Trump has shown he’s not afraid of political consequences in using his clemency power to correct what he perceives as unjust, politically motivated prosecutions.
Not only did he grant a pardon to D’Souza, who pleaded guilty to an illegal campaign contribution scheme, Trump said he might grant clemency or a pardon to former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and lifestyle guru Martha Stewart.
His renewed pardon talk comes amid federal investigations into his own campaign and inner circle — including an inquiry into whether his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, violat- ed the law when he illegally paid off a porn star who said she had a relationship with Trump.
Trump announced the D’Souza pardon on Twitter Thursday as he headed to Texas on Air Force One. In flight, he spoke to reporters for 34 minutes, ending with a discussion of possible pardons.
He told reporters that Blagojevich’s attempt to sell Barack Obama’s former Senate seat after Obama became president was “a stupid thing to say” but not worth 18 years in prison. Blagojevich, a Democrat, appeared on Trump’s reality television show Celebrity Apprentice in 2010. Trump said a pardon of Stewart also crossed his mind. Stewart, the head of a publishing and television empire who hosted a spinoff of The Apprentice, was convicted of obstructing justice in an investigation into insider trading in 2004.
On Twitter, D’Souza lashed out at Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney who prosecuted him and was fired by Trump.
He accused Bharara of destroying him to advance his career. “Then he got fired & I got pardoned,” he tweeted. “Obama & his stooges tried to extinguish my American dream & destroy my faith in America.”
D’Souza pleaded guilty to making “straw donations” in the names of others to support the candidacy of Republican New York Senate candidate Wen-
dy Long, who lost to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2012. Those straw donations allowed him to give $20,000 in illegal contributions to the campaign, exceeding the $5,000 legal limit.
Those facts provide a parallel to the federal investigation into Trump’s attorney, who may also face federal charges of exceeding campaign contribution limits and failing to disclose a $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claims she had an extramarital relationship with Trump in 2006.
Rick Hasen, a University of California-Irvine law professor who specializes in election law, said the pardon sends “yet another signal to Michael Cohen and others about the possibility of a Trump pardon.”
Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump has pardoned more people than any president since George H.W. Bush in 1989.
His pardons include former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, pardoned for contempt of court, and former Bush White House aide Scooter Libby for lying to the FBI in a leak investigation.
And last week, Trump gave a rare posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson, the former heavyweight boxing champion convicted in 1913 of racially motivated charges related to his relationship with a white woman.
Like all of those cases, D’Souza did not apply for a pardon with the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the Justice Department unit that conducts investigations of pardon cases and sends recommendations to the president. Under Justice Department rules, D’Souza would be ineligible through that process because he’s on probation.
Likewise, neither Blagojevich nor Stewart has applied for clemency.
The president’s constitutional authority to pardon is not bound by those rules, so Trump has granted politically charged pardons though he denied 180 applications from people who applied through the Justice Department.
“The pardon power itself is incredibly broad, but what informs the use of that power is where the critical question is,” said Andrew Wright, a Savannah Law School professor who handled pardon cases in the White House counsel’s office under Obama.
“He views it as an extension of his situational politics,” he said. “The coin of the realm in the Trump administration is flattery and aggressive defense of him on cable television, and if you’re willing to do that, you will get a different set of laws applicable to you.”
D’Souza, 57, is an Indian-born author and documentary filmmaker whose work has assailed Obama, Islam and multiculturalism. His most recent book is The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. Other works includes the book The
Roots of Obama’s Rage and the film 2016: Obama’s America, both of which argue that Obama’s politics were formed by the anti-colonial ideology of his Kenyan-born, estranged father.
Though he was spared prison time in the campaign-finance case, D’Souza’s conviction put him under court supervision. He was required to undergo weekly counseling sessions and complete an eight-hour day of community service during every week of his five-year probation.
He had to receive permission from a judge to leave the country in January for a research project to Nuremberg, Germany, where Nazis were put on trial for war crimes after World War II.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Trump determined D’Souza was “fully worthy of this pardon.”
“Mr. D’Souza was, in the president’s opinion, a victim of selective prosecution for violations of campaign-finance laws,” she said.