Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump:
President-elect Donald Trump said members of the now-defunct House select committee tasked with investigating the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol should be in jail.
....In the interview with Kristen Welker, Trump also claimed he would not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden.... “I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable,” Trump said. “But that’s not going to be my decision, that’s going to be Pam Bondi’s decision and, to a different extent, Kash Patel’s.”
....Trump also said he would let Bondi “do what she wants to do” regarding an investigation into Jack Smith.... “I think he’s very corrupt but I want [Bondi] to do whatever she … wants to do.”
He added, “I’m not going to instruct her to do it.”
Gee, I wonder if Trump will find something "reasonable"? I wonder if Pam Bondi and Kash Patel already know what Trump wants them to do even if he doesn't give them explicit instructions?
Biden should pardon everyone Trump or his team has ever mentioned. Does it set a bad precedent? Of course it does. It's a toxic precedent. But the real precedent buster is an incoming president who threatens to prosecute political opponents over and over and over. In the face of that, practically anything would be a bad precedent.
Is Trump just blowing hot air? I think he probably is. But why take chances?
Can he pardon the 77 million Americans for being idiots in the 2024 election?
Won't help them when all their living expenses go up, but it's the thought that counts. /s
The time for upholding precedence is long past. The time for taking the high road is long past. we are in survival mode. Pardon everyone.
Pardons? Pshaw. Joe has immunity (supposedly)--he should take out Unser Drumpfenfuhrer, Vance, and every single announced nominee (including his two fathers-in-law). Sort of like the Breaking Bad episode when Walter White arranged ten simultaneous prison killings. Of course, the odds that this SCOTUS will find a Democratic president has immunity is unlikely, but Joe should just hire Drumpf's legal team and delay past his likely life span.
I'm only joking, of course (well, mostly). But I'm dead serious that Biden should issue thousand of preemptive pardons in the face Drumpf's promise to prosecute hordes of people guilty of nothing but political opposition to him. Unlike Pollyanna Drum, I see no reason to believe that this is merely hot air. This is what our new fascist dictator lives for.
Soon, if not already, there won't be a sane person who enters politics, at any level.
Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell said Sunday that she “respectfully disagree(s)” with President-elect Donald Trump’s statement that all members of the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack should go to jail.
What the fuck if wrong with these Democrats using the words "respectfully disagrees" with respect to what the Orange Shit Stain said on this matter? She should have been ripping him a new asshole. Respectfulness in US politics died about 10 years ago when that Orange dick head road down the golden escalator in NYC.
Also:
Today former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger said that the J6 committee do not need pardons, and that “He’s not going to come after us, and I’m not worried about it at all, in the least,”
They may not have the balls to go after a sitting Senator like Schiff, but turncoat Republicans like Kinzinger and Cheney are perfect candidates for being put through the meat grinder at the new MAGA goose stepping DOJ.
From Trump perspective, the main purpose of the harassing system he tries to create is to harass active opposition people (whether democracts or "non-loyal" Republicans) from running in elections, to guarantee control of the congress and a win for whoever he gets to run for president in 2028.
Revenge can be done at any time. Winning the 2028 elections, i.e. scaring all serious Democract candidates from running, needs to happen by the beginning of 2028, so would be higher priroty as far as Trump is concerned.
I salute the members of the Jan 6 committee but I think the American public needs to see a Trump show trial in action. It would be a farce. People have this bizarre idea that he doesn’t mean what he says. They need to see the corruption with their own eyes. No one will be convicted of anything but trials and enquiries will expose the quislings and their motives.
The problem there is that rank assholes like Comer and Jordan will run their Star Chambers putting people through hell for months and bankrupting them with legal fees and other costs. This even with pardons--Comer is already preheating the grill for Hunter Biden over that Burisma bullshit--if not his father as well.
There is no reason the DNC couldn't put up the legal fees. Pardoning everybody that Trump might harass is a really bad idea. It more or less confirms that they illegally conspired against Trump. Let Trump prove it in court.
It should be a separate legal defense fund. The DNC exists to elect Democrats to office.
+1 to NotCynicalEnough's comment. I came to these comments to say this.
I get that that this is easy for me to say when I am not in legal jeopardy myself. I get too how much stress and cost these prosecutions could cost those who are charged, even given the fact that they charged with bogus crimes.
But like NotCynicalEnough, I would expect that the legal costs at least can be funded by others like the DNC, etc. And I think the charges won't last that long in court, given their spurious nature. Yes, yes, Trump judges and all that. But these prosecutions would be so egregiously unjust that I think they'd get eviscerated pretty early on in an the appeals process, if not in the original proceedings.
That, and I'd like to think that even a great many Trump voters would find the charges distasteful -- not the hardcore cultists, of course, but at least the swing voters who swung for Trump in the 2024 election. Having the ugliness be on display might have a silver lining in getting some people to rethink their support.
I too am prepared to risk somebody else's safety and convenience for this principle.
I sincerely am. No pardons; let 'em do their worst.
I know there's a heck ton of snark there but I think you do have a point.
Trump unleashed a blizzard of pardons on his way out the door in 2020. You can bet he'll so so again when he leavs again. If a Dem president does the same, then it creeps dangerouly close to becoming ordinary practice.
Is that how we want the system to work?
If we don’t want the system to work that way, we have to codify reform of the pardon power. Trump is the existence proof that the electorate will not punish violations of norms, no matter how egregious. And the proof that the legal system can be stymied by a well-funded, determined, unprincipled power-seeker. The documents case, in particular, should have been pursued much more aggressively.
Don't create toxic precedents out of fear. Especially pointless ones. Trump wants to investigate people for imaginary crimes. Why would a pardon of those imaginary crimes stop him from investigating people? The investigation is the point: cost, notoriety, and the chance at a real process crime. And your toxic precedent gives Trump political cover: "If those people didn't commit any crimes, why'd they need to be pardoned? Trump's right, we need an investigation to get to the bottom of this." If I were Trump, I'd simply create a special prosecutor to investigate Biden's "corrupt" pardons: you get to investigate *everyone* on the list over something that even liberals agree was unprecedented. Checkmate.
So you've created a toxic precedent that makes Trump's precedents less toxic. Mission accomplished.
This kind of logic is tempting for all the people eager to lay down and surrender before Trump ever takes office.
If you do anything, you will force Trump to counter and then it's all YOUR FAULT!
This may have made sense prior to Trumps first term, but now? Goodness....
No, that's incorrect. The rule of law is what is valuable, not (as much as it hurts to say it) the freedom from malicious investigation of a handful of relatively high-profile people.
It's a close case, in my mind. We want civil servants to work dispassionately in the public interest; protecting civil servants against politically motivated and bullshit investigations is accordingly important. But blanket pardons to everybody on Kash Patel's shitlist doesn't really do that. Investigations can still happen (after all, the motivation isn't to uncover crime but instead to punish people who dare uphold the law against Republicans in general and Trump in particular) whether or not there is a chance of conviction, so the punishment threat remains.
And preemptive pardons do much of the work Trump wants his nonsense investigations to accomplish: get his supporters and the general public to think that there is confirmation of all his deep state bafflegab. Normal people (and stupid people) who are all, after all, part of this democracy, will scratch their heads and wonder if Biden pardoneding these people from crimes means maybe they WERE all big criminals!, and that the system is corrupt and without value.
Put another way: the fight isn't to beat Trump per se, and it isn't measured necessarily by whether or not Trump gets to do a thing he says he wants to do. It's measured by how much we resist becoming like Russia, where a demoralized public doesn't care about democracy because it seems pointless.
Put still another way: both bullshit investigations of Trump's political enemies and blanket preemptive pardons undermine the rule of law and generate cynicism in the public, and thus both serve Trump's ends by undermining democracy.
The question in my mind is how to balance the things. I suspect that some people ought to be pardoned, but it's got to be a very, very careful calculation, since this is one of those cases where the medicine can kill the patient just as thoroughly as can the disease.
👍👍👍👍
Balance, a great word. Great description. I hope that everybody's fears are just that – that another Red errrr Orange Scare doesn't happen.
👍
THIS.
This is a wonderful, hopeful argument. But given that we just saw a targeted, political investigation (Hunter Biden) turn a man's life upside down, result in an extraordinarily unusual conviction and nearly everyone in the country taking false or misleading information away from the targeted prosecution, we should know better.
It's a massive error to assume that pardoning people who haven't committed a crime will undermine the rule of law because people might be misled about what this means. It's a massive error because not pardoning them will also lead to people being misled and there being a miscarriage of justice.
I just don't buy that pardoning innocent people to avoid a miscarriage of justice will undermine democracy.
Would saving a black man in the '20s from a wrongful arrest and lynching be threat to democracy because of the imagined threat of people misinterpreting the actions of saving the man?
This moral purity argument is ridiculous, but it is easy to make when others are the sacrifice you are willing to make as a display of meaningless purity. We don't save the rule of law by alllowing miscarriages of justice and hoping that our inaction will change the hearts and minds. We don't become Russia by pardoning innocent people. Literally nobody says that the problem with Russia is that too many innocent people were saved from targeted convictions by Putin. This is silly.
"Would saving a black man in the '20s from a wrongful arrest and lynching be threat to democracy because of the imagined threat of people misinterpreting the actions of saving the man?"
Of course not. The issue isn't saving "a [] man," it's using pardons to "save" hundreds (thousands?) of people preemptively and in so doing signal to the public that yeah, those people (probably) committed crimes (and that they are protected because they are loyal to Democrats?). That's why I say it's a tough question, where it might make sense for some individuals, but not for others.
For example, that Capitol police officer who shot one of the January 6 invaders would be somebody it would make sense to protect: it's a discrete instance, where a person without power could be subject to very real and very identifiable legal actions, and where, if pardoned, the individual would probably be left alone by the Trumpers. By contrast, I think that it wouldn't make sense to pardon Senator Schiff, or ex-AG Bill Barr.
There you go.
Florean said what I meant.
I call bullshit on this whole "political cover" trope. Trump will do whatever he likes and get away with it. he neither needs nor much benefits from political cover. that's the new normal. the norms biden has\would violate with pardons no longer exist. we have the same right to invent realities as the maga dickheads. until we get good at that we will continue to lose.
Trump doesn’t need cover; his cult doesn’t care if be violates laws or the Constitution, much less violate norms of which they are ignorant in any case.
"that’s going to be Pam Bondi’s decision." lol. As if any decision she makes won't be his decision. His supporters might be stupid enough to believe this but no one else will.
I disagree. Instead of doing pardons which is a slippery step to further undermining the consttution and rule of law, set up defense fund to pay the legal espenses of everyone Bondi/Trump prosecute. Make it big enough to intimidate.
As a legal matter, wouldn't such cases have to be brought in DC? No way a DC jury is going to convict anyone.
Once you get the FBI to harass the jurors, that becomes much less obvious.
Plus,i think it’s likely even many a Republican judge will be uncomfortable at the specter of public officials being widely and routinely persecuted on specious, nakedly political grounds.
How uncomfortable? A Collins or two? (Where 1 Collins = one-millionth of a givashit)
Well, I guess we'll see, but judges are in fact public officials. I realize some of the circuit judges are lost cause, stone MAGAts. But I honestly don't think this is the case with the Supreme Court, outside of Alito and Thomas (and maybe not even then). That is to say, there's a movement conservatism majority on the Supreme Court—zero argument from me. And this means fellow conservatives can usually count on them to hand down a favorable ruling when some highly important right wing policy priority is on the line, or when there's an issue that directly affects the Republican Party's ability to compete in elections.
I absolutely could be proven wrong on this in the fullness of time, but I personally think Roberts, Gorsuch et al have mostly already gotten what they want out of the MAGA movement (overturning of Roe, the weakening of the administrative state, the end of voting rights enforcement, the gifting of immunity to the executive branch, etc), and thus pure Trumpist rat-fuckery isn't something they're likely to prioritize (among other reasons because they're smart enough to know it could one day be a Democratic president who wants to engage in rat fuckery).
Time will tell!
Marcy Wheeler pointed out that pardoning critics of Der Trumpf et. al.. won't do anything. You can't get them all, and nothing stops the Klan from making up anything they want against anyone they want to, leading to lost money/time/energy trying to defend themselves. Even pardoning Hunter won't protect him when they subpoena him to testify before Congress or if he jaywalks across an intersection. Seems pointless.
This is the Marcy Wheeler who continues to this day to support Merrick Garland?
Just pardon everyone threatened with jail by any of the incoming 2nd Reich scum bags. Just days later, the only ones talking about this after Trump empties the prisons of all the J6 convicts who violently attacked police, will be the hand wringing Democrats in Congress.
I’m joining the camp of ‘pardons won’t stop a second Trump administration from using the legal system to harass his alleged enemies’. His man-crush Putin can give him advice on the use of tax-evasion charges to jail the opposition. I’m hopeful we’re not at the point of defenestrations. I go with setting up a legal-defense fund for victims of political prosecutions.
I get the talk of everybody just calm down, he can't just DO STUFF. The system will fight back, it always has. But here's the rub: how many of us are willing and have the resources to withstand even a month at the mercy of the Justice System™? Lives have been ruined by just charging somebody. And to top it off, I invite you to read up on the Innocence Project. And maybe Kafka. Throw in Dickens too.
This is an important consideration, and one that doesn't get nearly enough public attention paid. How many people have the resources and the willingness to fight the good fight, even if you know you will ultimately be vindicated? Is it worth your kid's college tuition, or your parents' end-of-life in a good versus bad nursing home, to spend years paying lawyers to go to court to fight back against politcally motivated bullshit charges? Or is it better to keep your head down, and not attract the ire of the War In Heaven that rages between Trump and Democracy?
I dunno how many people have the gumption and the freedom from want to, as basically private citizens, fight the justice department. And the fact that some people are being forced to ask these questions internally is already a marker of the decline of our democracy.
Without giving too much away, my line of work involves interacting with federal agency career staff. And they are pretty normal people: mortgages, kids in school, both spouses work, elderly parents, etc. The thing that unites them is that they forwent higher salaries in the private sector because they believed in democracy, they believed in public service, and they think that working for the people matters. Many of them live in DC, where they don't even have representation in Congress, in the very government that they serve.
And it breaks my heart that trustafarian incompetents like Trump, and goddamn plutarchs like Elon Musk (an immigrant who shits on immigrants), are gunning for them.
I don't know what will become of Trump if and when he perverts The Law to pursue people who he thinks have offended his unearned sense of dignity. But I hope to heaven that he pays for it, and pays dearly.
Strange having preemptive pardons as a new form of checks and balances. But this is where we are. We have to tap into everything available in the tool kit, including things never considered before.
Hear me out:
(a) Biden pardons all J6 participants for criminal convictions *except* Trump and his closest associates. "Cock-blocks" Trump while forcing Trump to self-pardon.
(b) Biden pardons the two men who helped Trump obstruct justice in the Mar-a-Lago hidden government documents case, but not Trump. Again, "cock-blocking" while forcing Trump to self-pardon.
(c) Biden pardons anyone involved in the investigations and prosecutions of J6 and the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
(d) Biden writes out a pardon to Trump, but requires him to sign on the line that he admits to having committed the crimes outlined by Jack Smith before it can enter into force, leaving Trump a way to avoid self-pardoning.
Sure, if the goal is to really get Trump's goat by doing what he wants done but faster and earlier.
Also, nothing "forces" Trump to self-pardon until early 2029 anyway. I doubt he'll feel any hesitation to do it then, so all of this is just cutesy nonsense.
Naw man. This is about cutting off Trump from claiming to help Americans while forcing him to show America that he will literally help himself.
Hope Biden just scorches earth and trolls while he has the power to do so. The country and his party both shafted him after his repeated attempts to do the right thing and usually succeeding. Hell, I think he should pardon the United Healthcare shooter. Let's see what the filthy SCOTUS five do.
Pretty bad word salad there by Trump.
First, saying he would only appoint a special prosecutor if he deemed it "reasonable" is an almost meaningless statement, would anyone ever do it if they found it not "reasonable" (and if so admit it)?
So already you have a non-answer, just filler. Then it seems he feels the need to instead say it's it's actually Bondi's job to determine if it will be "reasonable", so further saying providing zero information.
Then for whatever reason he throws in it's really up to Patel, to "some extent", and we already know he believes it's more than "reasonable", he's been very public about it, so we finally get some information, that it's very likely there will be prosecutions, "special" or otherwise, unless Bondi acts as a guardrail.
Trump's DOJ could do worse than get tied up chasing a bunch of frivolous prosecutions of affluent people. Don't make them look guilty by issuing pardons; let Trump rope-a-dope himself.
If Biden tries this mass blanket pardon thing, I hope some people refuse it and dare Trump to come after them. Better to organize legal defense funds than take a pardon for doing nothing illegal.