The Official "Damned Trump" Thread

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Apparently, the Trump campaign is paying Giuliani $20K per day to pursue this overturn-the-election nonsense. This makes me sad, for a couple of reasons:

1) Trump is clearly not getting his money's worth.

2) I could give Trump better legal advice for half that (based on his recent court appearances, I'm as least as good a lawyer as Giuliani).

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

The Trump campaign bleeds resources. The trumpet movement, though, great at turning nothing into something. Dan Cameron, who many might remember from the breonna taylor grand jury hilarities - has come up with another fun way to perpetuate the grift for Mitch and Co.

He wants to argue before the supreme court that public health orders which apply equally to public and religious schools..is discrimination. The Rona Approves.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Trump is threatening to veto a defense spending bill because he’s mad at Twitter. Let’s hope he does. Seriously. 

Boru

[Angrboda]

I suspect Barr knows where a lot of the bodies are buried. He's probably not someone you want to throw under the bus.

[Fake Messiah]

No wonder that Trump wants desperately to keep the job as president since it gives him many opportunities to steal money

New documents reveal Trump and Kushner are ‘major beneficiaries’ of pandemic loan program

Newly released documents show that businesses with addresses at properties owned by President Donald Trump and the family of son-in-law Jared Kushner raked in millions of dollars from a program intended to save American jobs during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

One loan that is certain to raise eyebrows was a $2.2 million loan to the Triomphe Restaurant Corp., which is located at Trump Tower in New York and which subsequently closed without using the money to save a single job.

In addition to that, NBC News found that “two tenants at 725 5th Avenue, Trump Tower, received more than $100,000 and kept only three jobs” and that “four tenants at the Kushner-owned 666 5th Avenue combined received more than $204,000, and retained only six jobs.”

On top of all that 15 of the businesses on Trump and Kushner properties that took loans reported saving one job or fewer, or didn’t even both reporting a jobs saved number.

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/new-doc...ogram/amp/

[arewethereyet]

A sitting president wanting pre-emptive pardons for his spawn. No, that's not an admission of their guilt. Such utter bullshit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...d=msedgntp

Speculation that President Donald Trump will issue pardons before he leaves office for members of his family or other supporters raises a question about whether pardons can be issued pre-emptively — that is, before someone is charged with a crime.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

A sitting president wanting pre-emptive pardons for his spawn.  No, that's not an admission of their guilt.  Such utter bullshit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...d=msedgntp

Speculation that President Donald Trump will issue pardons before he leaves office for members of his family or other supporters raises a question about whether pardons can be issued pre-emptively — that is, before someone is charged with a crime.

Ford did it for Nixon, so it probably wouldn’t be an issue.

Boru

[arewethereyet]

A sitting president wanting pre-emptive pardons for his spawn.  No, that's not an admission of their guilt.  Such utter bullshit.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/...d=msedgntp

Speculation that President Donald Trump will issue pardons before he leaves office for members of his family or other supporters raises a question about whether pardons can be issued pre-emptively — that is, before someone is charged with a crime.

Ford did it for Nixon, so it probably wouldn’t be an issue.

Boru

That was one president doing for a former president. And a president that stepped away from the office instead of hanging around inciting more crap. It's a bit different that Trump wants this all in place to protect his kids who are in honorary positions.  There must be something they need pardoning from.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Ford did it for Nixon, so it probably wouldn’t be an issue.

Boru

That was one president doing for a former president. And a president that stepped away from the office instead of hanging around inciting more crap. It's a bit different that Trump wants this all in place to protect his kids who are in honorary positions.  There must be something they need pardoning from.

Yes, it’s a bit different (but only a very little bit), but a president can pardon anyone he wants to for any reason, or for no reason at all.

But I was specifically addressing the question as to whether pardons can be granted pre-emptively. The pardon for Nixon would seem to establish a precedent that they can.

Boru

[Angrboda]

Nobody challenged Nixon's pardon. That doesn't mean his pardon couldn't have been challenged.

Of course, Trump has yet to pardon Manafort (or himself). But an ongoing case involving Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio, the controversial former Arizona sheriff (we’ve added the case to our Trump Docket data in the latest update), does raise important questions about limits on a president’s ability to grant pardons. This case offers a sneak peek into the kinds of arguments that could be made if Trump issues a pardon to someone like Manafort. But it also shows why, as long as he doesn’t pardon himself, asking the courts to overrule Trump’s pardons may be a stretch, since the pardon was arguably designed to be a boundless power, with only Congress and the voters as a check on its abuse. “This authority is pretty explicitly given to the president away from the courts,” Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, Austin, told me. “It wouldn’t be worth all that much if the courts had the power on a case-by-case basis to adjudicate whether individual pardons were invalid.”

You may recall that in August 2017, Trump announced that he was pardoning Arpaio, who was known for his hardline immigration enforcement tactics as sheriff. At the time, Arpaio had been convicted of contempt of court after he refused to comply with a federal court’s order to stop racially profiling Latinos during patrols. The pardon was disturbing to many legal experts, who were concerned it had stripped the court of the only mechanism by which it can enforce its decisions, leaving it unable to fulfill its constitutional obligations to people whose rights were violated.

If Arpaio had simply accepted his pardon and moved on, the story might have ended there. But he took the unusual step of petitioning the judge in his case, Susan Bolton, to vacate his conviction. People who have been pardoned don’t typically try to have their criminal records erased — the pardon absolves them of all the consequences of a crime but doesn’t change the fact that there was a conviction — but Arpaio argued that since he hadn’t yet been sentenced, the conviction should also be wiped from his record. Several advocates and law professors saw an opening and filed amicus briefs asking Bolton to cancel Arpaio’s pardon on the grounds that a pardon can’t be used to absolve officials who infringe on others’ constitutional rights. “A president couldn’t pardon all white people for a specific crime but not people of color, because that would violate the Equal Protection Clause,” said Aditi Juneja, a spokesperson for Protect Democracy, one of the advocacy groups challenging Arpaio’s pardon. “Similarly, the pardon power is constrained by other parts of the Constitution.”

In her ruling last fall, Bolton said the pardon was valid and refused to further engage with the question of whether the pardon should be overruled. That said, she did also refuse to vacate Arpaio’s conviction, saying that the pardon removes punishment, but doesn’t, in the words of a previous ruling, “blot out guilt.” Arpaio appealed her decision, and the case is now pending in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (the president’s least favorite circuit court), where a new set of judges will soon decide whether to take the question of the constitutionality of Arpaio’s pardon more seriously.
Pardons are criticized but rarely questioned

Perhaps even more than other constitutional provisions, the pardon was built on the hope that presidents would have the good sense not to abuse it. During their debates over the pardon power, the founders actually considered an exception that would stop a treasonous president from absolving co-conspirators who had also committed treason, but they ultimately decided against adopting it. The Constitution does outline a few limits to the pardon power — it only applies to crimes (not lawsuits), it can only be used to forgive federal (rather than state) offenses, and it can’t be used in cases of impeachment — and the courts have, over time, sketched out a few more boundaries.

“There is a check on a president who abuses the pardon power,” Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State University and an expert on pardons, told me. “He gets voted out of office or he is impeached.” Although a president hasn’t yet been impeached for an unpopular pardon, Ford’s popularity did suffer after he pardoned Nixon, and that may have cost him the 1976 election. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton also granted risky pardons — Bush functionally ended the Iran-Contra investigation, in which he was implicated, by pardoning six former Reagan administration officials, and Clinton pardoned his half-brother. But both Bush and Clinton granted these pardons in the waning days of their presidencies, when the political consequences weren’t as severe.

But generally, even though past pardons have been criticized and even investigated, the legitimacy of a president’s pardon hasn’t been questioned in the way that Trump’s pardon of Arpaio is being debated. Trump’s actions and rhetoric have, however, exposed a loophole in the pardon power: Even if a pardon is arguably an abuse of presidential power, there’s currently no clear way to undo the pardon itself. So now the question before the courts is whether Trump’s actions are extreme enough to warrant blowing up the constitutional status quo. Advocates of pardon restrictions say that their arguments really aren’t that radical — they just think pardons shouldn’t override the rest of the constitutional system. What remains to be seen is whether the courts feel the same way — or whether they’ll tell Trump’s critics to take their grievances to Congress.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why...al-pardon/