President Trump cannot pardon himself under the Constitution, according to a bipartisan group of top lawyers.
“The Constitution specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and removal,” Laurence H. Tribe, Richard Painter and Norman Eisen wrote in an opinion piece published by the Washington Post.
“It adds that any official removed through impeachment remains fully subject to criminal prosecution. That provision would make no sense if the president could pardon himself.”
Tribe is a leading constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. Painter was chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007, while Eisen served in the same capacity under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011.
The trio said the Constitution’s pardon provision allows the president to essentially act as a judge in another person’s criminal case and to intervene when he or she determines that would be equitable.
But they said there was no legal precedent where self-pardon had been recognized as legitimate.
In those circumstances, “the president is acting as a kind of super-judge and making a decision about someone else’s conduct, the justice of someone else’s sentence or whether it is in the national interest to prosecute someone else,” they wrote. “He is not making a decision about himself.”
“President Trump thinks he can do a lot of things just because he is president,” they continued. “But there is one thing we know that Trump cannot do — without being a first in all of human history. He cannot pardon himself.”
