President Donald Trump has a nefarious trick up his sleeve, warns legal analyst Glenn Kirschner.
Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and founder of the Justice Matters podcast, told The Daily Beast Podcast that it was “highly likely” Trump, 79, will exercise his pardon power to protect himself and his close circle from scrutiny.
“And then you know what our challenge will be, and I hope we’re up to the challenge,” Kirschner said. “We have to go into court, and we have to fight corruptly delivered pardons.”
“Even Bill Barr—and I almost never cite him as authority for any proposition—even Bill Barr testified, when asked, testified before Congress that if Donald Trump delivered a pardon to somebody who was covering up evidence of wrongdoing by Donald Trump—put another way, using the pardon to perhaps curry favor with or buy the silence of somebody who could implicate him—Bill Barr said that would be improper,“ he told host Joanna Coles. “That would be a crime. That would be an impermissible use of the pardon power.
Many administration officials could be recipients of Trump’s potential pardons.
Kristi Noem, recently ousted by Trump as head of the Department of Homeland Security and nicknamed ICE Barbie by the Daily Beast for her rotating wardrobe of law-enforcement outfits, might need clemency following reporting that she perjured herself on a number of key points during her Senate Judiciary Committee meeting earlier this month.
DHS rejected the allegation at the time, with a department spokesperson telling the Beast, “Any claim that Secretary Noem committed perjury is categorically false.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi could be a prime recipient also, given her disastrous handling of the investigation into convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. A DOJ official has described it as “a tired narrative.”
“What we have to do,” Kirschner said, ”is take these things into court and fight them because it’s the right and righteous thing to do."
“And if the courts—trial court, court of appeals, and the Supreme Court—all say no, a president can buy a co-conspirator’s silence by delivering a presidential pardon, then we continue to move in the direction of the end of our republic,“ he added. ”Because that is not what the pardon power ought to be able to do.”
Trump himself blasted former President Joe Biden for pardoning dozens of individuals during his final months in office.
Among those he pardoned were his son Hunter Biden, Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members of the House Select Committee who investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Trump, who has long mocked his Democratic rival as “Sleepy Joe Biden,” declared in December that all of his predecessor’s pardons were “null, void, and of no further force or effect” because of Biden’s use of an autopen.
“Anyone receiving ‘Pardons,’ ‘Commutations,’ or any other Legal Document so signed, please be advised that said Document has been fully and completely terminated, and is of no Legal effect,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in December.
However, legal experts say that Trump has no authority to overturn another president’s pardons, especially on the basis of how the signature was provided.
“The Constitution doesn’t even require that the pardon be written, so the idea that the signature is by autopen rather than by handwritten signature seems not relevant to the constitutionality because Article II just says that the President has the power to pardon,” Stanford law professor and constitutional expert Bernadette Meyler told TIME on Tuesday.
Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast: “Anything said on the Daily Beast podcast is equivalent to screaming into the void. No one listens to this Trump Derangement Syndrome therapy session.” The prior episode of The Daily Beast Podcast has reached over 162,000 views as of publication.
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