Accepting A Pardon Is An Admission Of Guilt
I grew up at a time when the most right-wing source of information came from William Buckley’s National Review. It’s still very right wing but Buckley is long gone. Over the weekend, the editors wrote that “it is impossible to read the indictment against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and not be appalled at the way he handled classified documents as an ex-president, and responded to the attempt by federal authorities to reclaim them [including] ‘information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.’… Equally damning, particularly for someone who was and would like again to be the nation’s chief executive, responsible for the enforcement of the laws, is the evidence that Trump not only deceived the investigators and the grand jury, but his own lawyers— knowing and intending that they would consequently obstruct the investigation. If the allegations in the indictment are true, Trump tried to nudge his lawyers into concealing or destroying incriminating evidence. Unable to bend them in that direction, he and an aide hid boxes of documents from them, causing them falsely to tell the grand jury, under oath, that the classified documents they delivered to the FBI in June 2022 were the only ones remaining in his possession. They weren’t lying; according to prosecutors, they were passing along what he told them. It is worth noting, moreover, that the substantiation of this allegation is likely to come from testimony of the lawyers themselves— not from people out to get the former president, but people who tried, futilely, to help him.”
Earlier today, the talking heads shows were focused on the same thing. Meet The Press spent the whole hour with a bunch of journalists prosecuting Trump. Dana Bash’s State of the Union was more interesting, right-wing Trump suck-up Gym Jordan— someone who will say anything— and Democratic freshman rising star Dan Goldman (NY), as well as two GOP presidential also rans, Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswarmy, who— between them— usually muster about 1% support among GOP primary voters. Bash welcomed Ramaswarmy by reminding him that before he heard any details of the allegations in the Trump indictment, he “put out a statement saying, if you become president, you would pardon Donald Trump on day one. Now you have seen the allegations, and you have seen that he stored highly classified information, like nuclear secrets and others, in unsecured areas of his country club. Given everything that you have seen, do you stand by your promise to pardon him if he's convicted?” I bet you can guess which canned GOP talking points this clown regurgitated, right? First, of course— the old Mafia trick— blame law enforcement and try to make it about them instead of the criminal. He referred to law enforcement as “the federal administrative police state.” Presumably Ramaswarmy forgot he wasn’t speaking to a Fox audience.
“Reading that indictment and looking at the selective omissions of both fact and law, Dana, I'm even more convinced that a pardon is the right answer here… The top question, actually, we should be asking is, what did Biden tell Merrick Garland? What did Merrick Garland tell Jack Smith? Because what I see in that document is deeply politicized, not a single mention of the Presidential Records Act, the most relevant statute to the actual alleged crime here, selective statements from President Trump's, statements on the campaign trail in 2016 about classification and how he'd treat it, without one mention of the fact that he actually, after he was elected in 2016, said he would not prosecute Hillary Clinton and would not want to see her prosecuted. And, by the way, no one's mentioned this yet. This was what stood out to me. The classification scheme itself was defined not by statute, but by executive order, which is interesting, because executive, orders appellate courts have held, do not bind a U.S. president with the force of law. So this is selective prosecution. I think it's irresponsible not to have included any treatment of those facts or law in this indictment. It reeks of politicization, which is why I want to go back to the top question that the media actually should be asking. What did Biden tell Garland? What did Garland tell Jack Smith? That's what you need to begin to the bottom of.”
When she cornered him with facts, he kept repeating Trump exhibited “bad judgment,” not criminality, even “very bad judgment.” Asa Hutchinson, the very conservative former governor of Arkansas, and a former federal prosecutor himself, followed. Unlike the idiot on before him, he quickly acknowledged that the indictment is “very solid.” When asked about Ramaswarmy’s pledge to pardon Trump, he told Bash, “Well, that's wrong. It is simply wrong for a candidate to use the pardon power of the United States, of the president, in order to curry votes and in order to get an applause line. It's just wrong, and it shouldn't happen that way. If you start down that path, it is unending. And so we shouldn't be promising and holding out the fig leaf of a pardon, because that undermines our jury system. It undermines the grand jury that found probable cause to have… say, well, there's going to be a pardon anyway for this. And so that really undermines the rule of law in our country that I have served my lifetime supporting. And it's offensive to me that anyone would be holding out a pardon under these circumstances.”
The most damaging interview to Trump, though, was on Fox News Sunday, where Shannon Bream hosted Trump’s former Attorney General, Bill Barr. Slamming— without naming— virtually every Republican in the House, Barr said that “this idea of presenting Trump as a victim here, a victim of a witch hunt is ridiculous.” He told the Fox viewers that the case against Trump is right there in “a very detailed indictment… If even half of it is true, he is toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning… He’s not a victim here.”
Barr said that the government acted responsibly in looking into Trump’s possession of the stolen classified material and made sure to let Fox viewers know that that it was Trump who “acted irresponsibly. He was totally wrong that he had the right to have those documents. Those documents are among the most sensitive secrets that the country has.”
Sooner or later proof is going to start bubbling up to the surface that Trump sold the top secret papers to the Saudis— and God knows who else— and it will be fantastic watching people like McCarthy, Jordan, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, etc try to separate themselves from Señor T at that point. Or are they as terminal as Marjorie Traitor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Ronny Jackson and Lauren Boebert at this point? The GOP is at a nexus— and so are the pathetic crew of little not-Trumps running for the presidential nomination. This evening, the NY Times noted that they’re all sitting there “with a stark choice between deferring to a system of law and order that has been central to the party’s identity for half a century or a more radical path of resistance, to the Democratic Party in power and to the nation’s highest institutions that Trump now derides. How the men and women who seek to lead the party into the 2024 election respond to the indictments of the former president in the coming months will have enormous implications for the future of the GOP.”
How to decide without wetting their bloomers is determined with how dependent their primary strategy is on winning over the MAGAt vote if Trump dies or is imprisoned on agrees to drop out in return for not going to prison. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson are slamming Trump and urging Republicans to take the charges seriously. Most of the field is insisting— shrilly— that the indictment is a politically driven means to deny him a second White House term. And then Meatball Ron and Nikki Haley who hate Trump’s guts but are afraid of the MAGAts… so they are in both camps. “The trick,” wrote Jonathan Weisman and Ken Bensinger, “for all of Trump’s competitors, will be finding the balance between harnessing the anger of the party’s core voters who remain devoted to him while winning their support as an alternative nominee.”
