Trump Flaunts His Indifference to the Rule of Law - By Andrew Sullivan

[DonViejo]

September 1, 2017
9:28 am

Even a week later, the stench of it hangs in the air. The pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio is one of the more chilling authoritarian moves that Trump has made so far. I say this not simply because Arpaio treated prisoners in his charge in barbaric ways; not just because the president described this brutality as Arpaio simply “doing his job”; not even because Arpaio proudly and constantly engaged in racial profiling, making Latino citizens and noncitizens alike afraid to leave their own homes. I say it for a simpler reason: because it is Trump’s deepest indication yet that the rule of law means nothing to him.

Yes, the pardon power has been abused before — as any perusal of Bill Clinton’s final days in office will confirm. But it makes a difference, it seems to me, when the president pardons a law-enforcement officer for openly breaking the law, and refusing to abide by a court order to stop doing so. It makes an even bigger difference if the pardon is granted long before the legal process has played itself out. This isn’t a pardon, as is usually the case, for someone who has served time, shows contrition and deserves some kind of mercy. It is a pardon seemingly designed to blow a raspberry at the court system, and tell anyone in law enforcement or border control or ICE or anywhere for that matter that, if you commit brutal or illegal acts, the big man has your back.

This is government as an unaccountable, legally immune thug. Of course Trump telegraphed this in the campaign by backing violence against dissenters in his rallies, championing torture, and when he recently told police officers it was fine to manhandle criminal suspects. I still have a hard time imagining a president of the United States openly showing contempt for due process or basic decency; but here we are. No one could defend this — even National Review and The Wall Street Journal were disgusted. But say what you like about Trump, this attraction to brute force, this reveling in it, is something he has never hidden.

Is it also a signal that the president could pardon — even preemptively — anyone caught up in criminality in the Mueller investigation? I suspect so, even though Mueller subtly responded to that threat last Wednesday, by letting it be known he is working alongside Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York. State crimes, after all, can’t be pardoned by the president. But that Trump is even thinking along these lines is a sign of how deeply our system depends on the honor of the individuals involved. An instinctual despot like Trump can find even the most benign of the president’s constitutional powers — the pardon — and turn it against the rule of law. We really need to remind ourselves of this on a daily basis if we are not to become numb to it: to advance his own interests, there is nothing this president would not do. If we enter, as we well might, a constitutional crisis, we have been warned all too clearly what this man is capable of.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/trump-flaunts-his-indifference-to-the-rule-of-law.html

[gratuitous]

1. Oh Andrew!

Sullivan's only example of the abuse of the pardon authority is Bill Clinton. Sadly, he doesn't specify what pardon; I'll guess Marc Rich, who still had to face prosecution in state courts when he returned from exile.

I wonder why Andrew doesn't remember a far more egregious abuse of the President's pardon authority - namely, lame duck George H.W. Bush issuing pardons in the dead of night on Christmas Eve for Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert MacFarlane, Clair George, Duane Clarridge, and Alan Fiers. Coincidentally, Bush praised Weinberger as an American patriot, the exact rationale cited by Trump in pardoning Arpaio.

In the time since these men got their presidential pardons, has anyone else been victimized by Marc Rich? No. The same can't be said of (at least) Elliott Abrams, who continues to haunt the corridors of power in Washington. In addition, by decapitating the Iran/contra investigation on the eve of trial, Bush made sure that the evidence wouldn't come out in open court that he was not "out of the loop" as he claimed he had been.

But in Andrew's world, it was Clinton and Clinton alone who has abused the power of the pardon, because Andrew doesn't like to remember his career from those days of the early 1990s. Go back to Old Blighty, Andrew.