Report: Trump Has Repeatedly Asked If He Can “Preemptively” Pardon Himself

At present, Donald Trump is embroiled in an absurd attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election because he’s physically incapable of admitting defeat and maybe also because he sees it as a possible way to collect a nice chunk of change from the easy marks that are his supporters. Eventually, though, his efforts will fail; Joe Biden will move into the White House on January 20, 2021, and Trump will revert to being just another civilian, albeit one with so much debt and bitterness that national security experts fear the possibly that he might reveal state secrets for money. Also: he’ll no longer be able to use the staff of the Justice Department as his personal legal team to fend off prosecutors, which is a very worrisome thing for a guy who’s potentially committed numerous crimes; we know this because, according to the New York Times, he’s concerned “not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well.” And that obviously brings us to the question of whether or not he might actually try to pardon himself. And the answer to that question is: it definitely sounds like he might!

CNN reports that Trump has been asking aides since 2017 if he can self-pardon, which is just an amazing thing to behold given that he had just been inaugurated and apparently his first order of business as president was to be like, “Soooo….I was talking with some people and they were asking me, ‘Hey, Don, you’re president. You know these things, these pardons, are you allowed to do them on yourself?’ And I thought, That’s a great question. I had never thought of that but it’s a beautiful question.” According to one former White House official, Trump has also asked about pardons for his family, which makes sense given that they work together at the Trump Organization and possibly engaged in various forms of tax fraud together, among other things. Perhaps most incredibly, Trump reportedly “even asked if he could issue pardons preemptively for things people could be charged with in the future,” said the former official. Y’know, like a get-out-of-jail-free card for life just in case you decide to commit a crime at any point in the future.

Not surprisingly, because Trump has the mind of a child, the former official said that “Once he learned about it, he was obsessed with the power of pardons. I always thought he also liked it because it was a way to do a favor.” So taken was Trump by the idea of the ability to wave a wand and get rid of any legal consequences for a criminal conviction that senior officials would apparently bring it up out of nowhere if they needed to get him to shut up about something else:

One former official said Trump was so fascinated by his pardon powers that senior-level officials would sometimes bring up their research on the matter just to get Trump off another subject they wanted to steer away from.

“He asked stuff [about pardons] all the time—asking this stuff of everybody,” one person said, meaning there’s a nonzero chance Trump would bring up pardons with, like, the Secret Service, the East Wing housekeeper, and whoever was forced to dress up as the Easter Bunny after Sean Spicer was put out to pasture.

Regarding whether or not Trump would actually pardon himself, former aides who say he wouldn’t do it believe so only because “doing so would imply he’s guilty of something.” (“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” he tweeted in June 2018.) But others think it’s basically a given. “Of course he will,” the former White House official told CNN. And while he presumably wants to, it’s not actually clear Trump can, although apparently there is an insane scenario in which he could fake sick and temporarily make Mike Pence president just so he could do the honors:

Trump’s legal team and administration officials have downplayed the prospect [of a self-pardon]. There’s no precedent for doing so and the constitutionality of such a pardon is untested constitutionally, with legal experts split on whether it would be legitimate. The Justice Department looked at the question in the Nixon era and concluded it wasn’t within the president’s power to pardon himself. “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself,” the Office of Legal Counsel wrote in August 1974.

The OLC memo laid out alternate possibilities of which Trump could avail himself: he could temporarily declare himself unable to perform his presidential duties, allowing the vice president to act as president, including by issuing him a pardon, and then the president could resume his duties as president, or resign.

Even if Trump can pardon himself or have Pence do it for him, a self-pardon would only protect him from federal crimes and not a number of ongoing investigations and civil suits currently underway, including two led by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who are pursuing possible criminal charges related to the Trump Organization.