Skip to content
- Home
- 2020
- September
- 19
- Rudy Goes Big for Tyranny: Says Trump 'Probably Does' Have Power to Pardon Himself
“If the President decided he was going to pardon himself, that’s almost self-executing impeachment.” —Preet Bhahara, former federal prosecutor”He has no intention of pardoning himself, but that doesn’t say he can’t.”
That’s what President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claimed Sunday morning on ABC‘s “This Week” after he was asked directly by host George Stephanopoulos if the president’s current legal team believes the president has the power to pardon himself.
Watch:
The question came in the wake of a leaked legal memo Trump’s lawyers sent to Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller earlier this year—obtained by the New York Times and published on Saturday—which stated their belief that Trump cannot be charged with obstruction of justice and retains sweeping pardon powers when it comes to all federal prosecutions, including ones for which even the president himself might be a subject.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Responding to Giuliani’s comments, former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara told CNN‘s Dana Bash that “If the President decided he was going to pardon himself, that’s almost self-executing impeachment.”
And Renato Mariotti, another former federal prosecutor, retorted, “If this sounds like tyranny to you, that’s because it is.”
In a column on Sunday morning, Vox‘s Matthew Yglesias characterized the memo from Trump’s legal team as “a recipe for tyranny” and a “clear and present danger to the rule of law.”
Though it’s clear this claim of far-reaching presidential authority has specific implications for the ongoing Mueller probe, Yglesias says the implications go much further than that:
And if Trump, he concludes, “really does have the power to just make anyone’s legal trouble go away because he happens to feel like it, then we’re all in a world of trouble.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.