Pardon me, but biased president has no principles

IN 1787 when America’s Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution they made sure to include several steps to limit a president’s power. But since entering the White House, Donald Trump has found ways to defeat most of them.

One of the greatest joys his presidency has brought him is the almost absolute authority to issue pardons to convicted criminals.

There is no other part of the Constitution that Trump seems to know better.

Since coming to office he has pardoned a contemptuous sheriff, a convicted internet troll, a murderous soldier and a former Republican Assembly leader who criticised the Russia investigation. All were united in their outspoken love for Trump.

Now he has gifted his latest Get Out Of Jail Free card to British peer Conrad Black.

The disgraced media mogul, who once owned the Daily Telegraph, served 37 months after he was charged in 2007 with swindling his company, Hollinger International, out of €53million.

Black once told a judge: “I never ask for mercy and seek no one’s sympathy. I do ask you now to avoid injustice.” Although his pardon came

too late to avoid prison, his presidential reprieve proves that in Trump’s America justice is for strangers not for his friends.

Lord Black of Crossharbour had worked in partnership with the president to build Trump Tower in Chicago, but more recently he has written several gushing pieces about him. The fraudster penned an article in 2015 headlined “Trump Is The Good Guy” sending the president delirious.

However, one paltry piece wasn’t enough.

Last year Black published “Donald J Trump: A President Like No Other”, an enthusiastic celebration of his friend filled with egotistical validation of the president’s time in the Oval Office.

“Trump rarely tells outright lies such as the media endlessly impute to him and a political leader who fudges facts is hardly unprecedented,” Black prattles in the first chapter.

“For Trump establishing the facts of a matter is as much a competition as anything else.

“Like the country he represents, Donald Trump possesses the optimism to persevere and succeed, the confidence to affront tradition and convention, a genius for spectacle and a firm belief in common sense and the common man.”

In writing such drivel, he effectively also wrote his own pardon.

In a statement announcing the reprieve, the White House described Black as making “tremendous contributions to business, as well as to political and historical thought,” while having a “distinguished reputation for helping others”.

Controversy over pardons is nothing new, but no president has wielded the power to grant clemency with as much blatant bias as Trump. The prospect of a pardon has been used as a tool to convince those indicted as a result of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation to not co-operate with federal authorities against the president.

Though the stakes may not be as high regarding the reprive of Black as others in US politics, the shameless nepotism isn’t any less noteworthy.

Only the president can decide to exercise his pardon power in an evenhanded and principled way.

Of which he has none.

In Trump’s America justice is for strangers not for his friends