Trump said he would consider pre-emptive pardons to protect Elon Musk and other close aides should Democrats take control of Congress
Donald Trump said he would be willing to protect Elon Musk and his staff if Democrats take control of Congress after the midterm elections this week.
In an interview for the “Pod Force One” podcast published Monday, Trump said he would move to “protect” the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla CEO if Congressional investigators targeted him.
Trump also indicated that he was weighing pre-emptive pardons for his close aides and others around him should the Democrats pursue investigations, according to Axios. It is a notion that the president has floated before to keep his team from facing prosecution for actions during the first two years of his term.
Maybe it’s time to float rewriting the pardon powers so there’s checks and balances that can’t be abused, because you know if one did it more will do the same otherwise. Invalidate his pardon power, invalidate his pardons, crimes committed by those in office should not be pardonable, etc.
We need to make it so that the president can only pardon people who they don’t personally know, and who didn’t commit crimes that directly benefit them.
The J6ers shouldn’t have been pardonable, members of his administration should not be pardonable. Only private citizens whose crimes had no benefit to the president.
And there should be a limit to how many they get. Like 36 a year or something. Thats 3 per month; more than enough!
It’s never that simple. Even the limit is a good idea on paper, but pardons also apply to people who have been convicted of “offenses” that should never have been offenses to begin with (IMO marijuana possession is a huge one.) If the prez happens to have heard or met any of them personally, they wouldn’t be eligible? Hardly seems fair. And yet, someone out there would argue this, you just know it.
can only pardon people who they don’t personally know, and who didn’t commit crimes that directly benefit them
Easy to abuse the other way too. Just have a group lobby to pardon someone so there’s no direct relationship between pardoner and pardonee. Would probably meet “legal criteria”, or there’ll be a subtler move that does meet legal criteria, because legal criteria change.
Unless there is a mechanism to PREVENT pardons from being issued without prior review, but even then: the review process can be abused (see: Supreme Court full of bought judges).
I also don’t understand why anyone can uphold the logic of “guilty, but there won’t be punishment”. Any system that’s based on that kind of logic needs to be abolished. If there’s a confirmed offense, there need to be consequences, period. If the offense shouldn’t have been an offense in the first place, there needs to be actual restitution made and some other mechanism than just saying “sorry, my bad”–it shouldn’t have more weight when it comes from the president, come on. Presidents are just people, human beings holding an office. (The fact that they’re venerated in some places is a fucking problem, not a feature.)
In some cases there can’t be restitution without causing damage to innocents; “heads need to roll” when that happens (there should be damage to those who continued enabling whatever went wrong.) And so on, but all of those steps can be abused.
Yet we go the other way these days (oh, nobody’s really “guilty” of anything) and it’s no wonder the president can be a convicted felon. I’m fucking tired.
Tell me you’re guilty as fuck without telling me you’re guilty as fuck.
Everything out of that loser’s mouth for the last decade has been screaming that he’s guilty.
Pardoned for what?
They haven’t been convicted of any crimes (yet)?
How is a pre-emptive pardon even a thing? The notion alone seems like a perversion of the original intent.
Unfortunately, there is precedent as Ford’s pardon of Nixon included future crimes. It’s fucking stupid.
You can’t call it a “precedent” if it was not contested in a legal environment.
That said, the constitution allows too much bullshit. It needs to be culled.
It’s because WE have to follow rules and THEY dont
oh, I think that even if he premptively pardons the entire gang, Congress should investigate anyway. Just so that the record of what they did is made public and Trump doesn’t get to revise the historical record.
Fuck all that, I’m sick of pageantry and fucking reports, these fuckers need to go to PRISON they’ve committed an insane number of crimes and there needed to be consequences!!!
Aren’t pardons only for convictions. Have them plead and specify the deads so they have immunity
Then charge them elsewhere. Tax them. Civil suits.
Aren’t pardons only for convictions.
No. Pardons can cover crimes that have not yet even been charged. And they don’t have to reference specific crimes either.
even if he premptively pardons the entire gang
Depends on what you mean by “pre-emptively.” If you mean before they’ve been charged, that part is true. But pardons can only be for events in the past, so that interpretation of “pre-emptively” isn’t valid. I’m guessing you meant the former.
“Pre-emptive pardon” is just another way of saying you are giving someone an exemption from having to follow the law.
Pardon for what? Election manipulation? Theft? Treason? Overstaying his education visa?
Yes
I think we need an amendment to rescind the pardon. Reduce it to a stay of execution only. Why is it even a thing? Did they really think giving this power to a sitting president would ONLY be used to right injustices? It’s a friggin unlimited commit crimes and get out of jail free card.
Yeah, pardons don’t make sense unless you believe that executives can never do wrong.
Which is a very strange belief to have as people in the process of rebelling against a king because he made decisions they didn’t like.
Pardons also make sense to correct miscarriages of justice. The justice system often leads to anomalous outcomes, and there needs to be a way to correct them.
So the pardon power should be restricted but not abandoned altogether: for example, no self-pardons, no pardons for crimes that have not been charged yet, no general pardons, no pardons for anyone who holds an Executive branch political appointment until (say) five years after a conviction.
Pardons also make sense to correct miscarriages of justice.
In theory.
But who defines injustice?
Currently, the executive can just label any and all prosecution of anyone they like a “miscarriage of justice,” as Donald Trump routinely does.
In my opinion, you shouldn’t get a reprieve just because you’re on good terms with the executive; you should have to ride out the justice system like anyone else. If it produces injustice - and it surely does - reform that.
Yeah, while stuff like this is very bad, Chelsea Manning was pardoned for the crime of leaking government secrets pertaining to the torture of prisoners in Iraq. She also had a whole 8th amendment case going on, but it would have taken many years to have a shot of freeing her on that.
Pardons however do need to be seriously curtailed, and should require that the individual have been convicted and not be affiliated with the president or their administration in any way. If President Josh Shapiro wants to pardon Elon he can go right ahead. Elon is a trump ally who was acting as part of his administration and hasn’t been convicted yet. Hell, Ford was Nixon’s VP and an elected member of the same party, if Carter wanted to pardon him after conviction that’s fine, but hell no to Ford
there should 100% be a check on pardons, like everything else. However, it wouldn’t do much good in this situation seeing how congress and SC have already abdicated their duties.
Kings had the power of pardon and they were creating a replacement for a king.
Biden used it to protect his family members and Dr. Fauci. Might’ve been a real risk of some retaliation in the air.
I never said some that there weren’t a few good uses. It’s just not worth the cost in my opinion. Biden saved two and Trump pardoned thousands from 01/06.
Look at that. The neo-Nazi scumbag is guilty before the prosecution opens a case.
How fucked up of a country is it that, in America, if Hitler was around living in Texas and putting Jews in concentration camps and murdering them, the president could pardon him?
This isn’t a left or right. Abolish pardons. No one should be above the law. Yes I understand shitty governments would weaponize this fast. I don’t care.
Trump. Elon. The whole lot of them need to be on trial for policies that have murdered millions worldwide.
He’s unwittingly telegraphing that they should only pursue state-level prosecutions while he’s still in office. Not that they didn’t know that already.
A pardon won’t keep him from being de-naturalized & deported.
I like your thinking.
If the act for which the pardon was issued was the grounds for the denaturalization, it couldn’t be used as the basis for a federal administrative sanction such as denaturalization. There’s precedent for that.
You think Elon’s going to stop committing crimes? That’s adorable.
Pardons don’t stop state indictments and the fact that Trump is pardoning Elon to help cover up his own crimes is all that is required for the next president to nullify those same pardons.
I feel like we’re getting dangerously close to the point where we start making our own justice
Someone already gave you guys a good example
‘Chop chop!!’
They invented “Presidential immunity”. Time for Dems to invent “void corrupt pardons”. Found in the same section of the Constitution.
Next president better reverse all these dollarstore pardons.
If pardons were easily reversed, surely many would’ve been this year if not last year.
Elon needs to spend the rest of his pathetic loser life in prison
