Dragging us toward crisis
By Greg Sargent
August 28 at 10:11 AM
... multiple legal experts have pointed out ... Trump has signaled leniency toward law enforcement officials who refuse to obey judicial commands that they remain constrained by the Constitution, if they are loyal to Trump, or if his "base" will thrill to it. As Harvard’s Noah Feldman argued, Trump’s move appears to "threaten the very structure on which his right to pardon is based,” which risks “breaking the basic structure of the legal order" and constitutes an "abuse of the pardon power to break the system itself."
Schiff told me that .. this pardon .. suggests it may be a signal to officials .. caught up in the Russia probe. "I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that the president is sending a message to those who worked on his campaign that he is not beyond using the pardon power to protect them and protect himself," Schiff said. He added that Trump showed that "he’s willing to do it even prior to sentence," which signals that he might be prepared to exercise it "to fend off any further criminal proceedings" ...
"If a president uses a pardon to buy the silence of a defendant or suspect in a criminal case, the witness will still go free," Robert Bauer, a former White House counsel under Barack Obama, told me. "But the president could face impeachment. Congress is not bound by the requirements for formal legal liability: A High Crime as a basis for impeachment might overlap with the version in the legal system, but there is no requirement that it do. Congress makes its own determination in judging whether the president should remain in office."
"Congress could pretty clearly use this as a basis for impeachment," Martin Redish, a professor of constitutional law at Northwestern University, added in an email to me. "This isn’t just another controversial move by a controversial president. This is the first salvo in a war for the survival of American constitutionalism" ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/08/28/trump-is-dragging-us-towards-a-full-blown-crisis-heres-what-has-to-happen-now/?utm_term=.a802218a5d9c
= new reply since forum marked as read
