Of Pardons and Presidents Trump’s clemency for Stone has nothing on Clinton and McDougal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/of-pardons-and-presidents-11594584012
Say this for President Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone’s 40-month prison sentence late Friday: At least he did it during an election campaign so voters can add this to the ledger of character issues they take into the voting booth. Like everything else about this Presidency, its scandals, real and imagined, are public.
On the merits, the judgment of Attorney General William Barr sounds right. Mr. Barr recently called Mr. Stone’s prosecution “righteous” and “appropriate.” He had his department review the excessive recommendation of up to nine years in prison by special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors, and Justice revised its recommendation in line with what the judge ordered.
Mr. Stone is no martyr. He is by his own description a political performance artist, and he finally ran into prosecutors who weren’t amused. There are legitimate questions about the anti-Trump bias of the jury forewoman, but the full jury found Mr. Stone lied to investigators and tried to bully witnesses. He was probably trying to protect the lies he had previously told to make himself seem more influential than he was. The proper avenue for addressing trial bias is on appeal.
The commutation spared Mr. Stone from having to report to prison on Tuesday, where the 67-year-old would have been vulnerable to Covid-19. But Mr. Trump didn’t issue a full pardon, which means Mr. Stone’s felony conviction stands and so does his appeal. It’s too bad Mr. Trump let Mr. Barr spend political capital to recommend a lighter prison sentence only to commute that sentence later. Mr. Trump tends to do that to people who work for him.
Mr. Trump is right that there’s no evidence that Mr. Stone knows some deep, dark secrets about his ties to Russia. The Mueller investigators spent two years digging into that and came up with little beyond Mr. Stone’s lies about his contacts with WikiLeaks and the 2016 Trump campaign.
As for the cries of “corruption” and “cronyism,” join the presidential club. Mr. Trump views the world in terms of political friends and enemies, and the commutation rewarded a friend. That is an abuse of the pardon power in our view, but we recall Bill Clinton’s last-minute January 2001 pardon of Susan McDougal, who went to jail for contempt rather than tell prosecutors what she knew about Mr. Clinton’s Whitewater transactions. Worse, Mr. Clinton made public comments in the autumn of 1996 that suggested Ms. McDougal could expect the pardon she received. That history is now whitewashed away by a press corps that talks as if the pardon power was a sacred trust before Mr. Trump took office.
Mr. Trump is also scored for not following Justice Department protocol on pardons, but that’s precisely what Mr. Clinton did in pardoning Marc Rich in 2001. Does anyone recall that Barack Obama commuted the sentence of an unrepentant Puerto Rican terrorist who had become a cause celebre on the political left, and of Chelsea Manning, whose leaks jeopardized American troops and Afghan translators fighting the Taliban?
Nancy Pelosi claims to be so upset by the Stone commutation that she’s considering legislation to restrict the President’s pardon power. She surely knows that no Speaker of the House is above the law, which means Article II of the U.S. Constitution that makes the pardon power as close to categorical as anything in the great document. For some reason, she never introduced such a bill when Democratic Presidents were pardoning their friends.
Our hope is that the Stone commutation doesn’t interfere with what would be a deserved pardon for Michael Flynn. The former national security adviser was railroaded by James Comey’s FBI, then denied exculpatory evidence by Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors. That would be a proper use of the pardon power, which is to correct an injustice. The voters can judge it all in November.
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