Lord Acton’s maxim about absolute power corrupting absolutely is helpful in judging presidential pardons amid a slew granted by President Trump. The chief executive’s clemency power is nearly absolute; “vast and unreviewable” is how three legal scholars described it in the Washington Post in November. And the way presidents exercise it allows us to see what actuates them, sometimes revealing genuine thoughtfulness about mercy and the national interest, but as often exposing areas of moral degradation.
Trump’s least justifiable — perhaps least pardonable — pardon was that of Paul Manafort, who’d been convicted of egregious tax fraud and sentenced to more than seven years in prison. His was a serious crime, and it was largely unexpiated. So, although the Wall Street Journal was right when it opined that people who hate political pardons should show an equal distaste for political prosecutions, Trump’s clemency to Manafort nevertheless highlighted two areas of his own turpitude — narcissistic expectation of unswerving loyalty even in defiance of the law and an indulgence of rapacious peculation.
In his soft spot for graspers and loyal rogues, Trump resembles President Bill Clinton. (He does so also in his common touch or wince-inducing vulgarity, depending on your point of view.) Shortly before leaving the White House with a stash of federal property, Clinton pardoned financier Marc Rich, who was one of the least deserving recipients of clemency ever. The exquisitely named Rich had not paid any of his dues. He was, indeed, on the lam, a fugitive from justice. But that dwindled to irrelevance beside the $450,000 that his wife Denise donated toward Clinton’s presidential library, starting in 1998, two years before Bubba handed down his pardon. Rarely if ever can the dollar price of a president have been made clearer. Clinton also pardoned Susan McDougal, a long-standing crony who went to jail rather than cooperate with independent counsel Ken Starr. Like several other acolytes, she agreed to “roll over,” so to speak, for Clinton, who rewarded her.
The Trumpo-Clintonian species of presidential corruption is just one variant. President Barack Obama had another, which was less crude but no better. In one of his final acts before leaving the White House, he granted clemency to the leader of a terrorist organization that murdered at least five Americans. Oscar Lopez Rivera had been in the high command of a Marxist group that took up arms for Puerto Rican independence and conducted a series of fatal bombings in the 1970s. Rivera had a bomb factory in his Chicago apartment.
Although he’d served 35 years in prison by the time Obama released him, he was arguably thoroughly undeserving of clemency, for he planned further murders even while behind bars. But whether or not clemency was merited, it certainly cast light into the core of the man in the Oval Office. Unlike every other president, Obama often appeared to agree with America’s critics and to lack patriotic antipathy toward its active enemies. When people excoriated America and even attacked it, Obama’s instinct was not to leap to his country’s defense but to make excuses by suggesting moral equivalence. Recall his “apology tour” early in his first term, which included a speech in Cairo, birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood, in which he focused as much or more on America’s mistreatment of Muslims as on Muslims’ recent murderous mistreatment of Americans. Obama’s use of the pardon power showed his particular vice as clearly as Trump’s and Clinton’s showed theirs.
By far, the highest-profile act of presidential clemency was President Gerald Ford’s pardon of President Richard Nixon for all offenses he “committed or may have committed” while president. There were those who suggested at the time that this may have been a corrupt quid pro quo required by Nixon in exchange for his resignation, and it sparked rage. The White House switchboard was jammed with people calling to complain.
Ironically, however, this most controversial of pardons, viewed after the passage of time and with an open mind, does not reveal corruption in the man granting it but, rather, his core decency and sense of duty. Ford used his pardon power, as he explained, in hopes of ending the national nightmare and restoring political and social tranquility. It was not a politically savvy or ruthless move, for it contributed to his loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976. But it was more statesmanlike than many presidential pardons — and just as revealing.
