Allies of President Trump have been pardoned after backing efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is among the dozens of names that the Department of Justice announced yesterday on social media.
President Trump’s team lost case after case in its challenges, and liberal and conservative scholars have found NO evidence of systemic voter fraud.
Liz Oyer, a pardon lawyer in the Biden administration, says Trump’s move sets an “alarming precedent.”
4 questions with Liz Oyer
These people have not been charged with federal crimes. So why provide federal pardons at all?
“Yeah, that’s a great question. The Constitution gives the president very broad pardon power, but the one recognized limitation, because it’s in the constitutional text, is that the pardon power applies only to offenses against the United States, which means federal crimes.
“All of these folks have been investigated and charged with state crimes. So the question is, are these merely symbolic pardons or is the president really trying to test that fundamental limitation on the scope of the pardon power to a place where he can actually pardon his allies who are charged with crimes against state law?
“The scope of that would be tremendous. It would be unprecedented in our history. But the way these documents are written suggests that that may, in fact, be what Donald Trump is trying to do here.”
Could this also be preemptive to insulate these persons from future federal prosecution?
“These pardons do have the effect of insulating these folks from future federal prosecutions. But there’s no reason to believe that any of these individuals are going to be federally prosecuted. They were not federally prosecuted during the Biden administration, and they are not going to be federally prosecuted by this administration. So that doesn’t really explain why Trump would grant these pardons.
“There’s no need for preemptive pardons in these cases as far as federal charges are concerned. So it seems like the more likely possibility is that he is trying to test the limits of whether he can pardon offenses against state law.
“There are a number of very popular figures in the MAGA world, including a woman in Colorado named Tina Peters, who is in prison on state charges. And there’s been a lot of interest by Trump’s current pardon attorney, Ed Martin, in trying to find a way to pardon Tina Peters. Tina Peters is facing only state charges. She’s not charged federally, so the president’s pardon power cannot help her lawfully. But this appears to be a step in the direction of testing the limits to see if the president can, in fact, intervene in state court criminal cases, which would be unprecedented and not what our Constitution intended.”
Could this simply be a political exercise here to get a lot of mileage on social media to restate this claim for which there’s no basis of widespread election fraud?
“Certainly, yes.
“It’s a statement of the values of this administration and the values of the current leadership of the Office of the Pardon Attorney. It’s consistent with the January 6 pardons, which pardoned all of those who were convicted of offenses at the Capitol on January 6. And it’s more of the same that we’re seeing. It is sending messages to the MAGA base that if you commit crimes in the name of Donald Trump, the administration will stand by you. You can expect to be forgiven for those crimes. You can expect that Ed Martin, the pardon attorney and the Justice Department will have your back.
“So it’s actually setting a very dangerous and alarming precedent by sending this message to those who may be thinking about committing crimes in the name of MAGA or Donald Trump, that they can expect that they will not face consequences under our laws for those crimes.”
President trump himself, his name is not on this list. What do you make of that?
“Well, Donald Trump has said in the past that he believes he has the power to pardon himself. That is something that has not been tested previously. We don’t know what the courts would say or what the Supreme Court would ultimately decide about whether the president can pardon himself.
“But here, Donald Trump doesn’t need to do that because the Supreme Court has granted him broad immunity and there’s no real possibility that he will be prosecuted for anything related to these offenses. So he seems to have taken one controversial issue off the table by saying that he’s not intending to pardon himself. There’s plenty of controversy baked into this pardon document without that. And we’ll see how it all plays out in the courts.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Ashley Locke produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Micaela Rodriguez. Michael Scotto produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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