It helps to have a friend in the Oval Office if you want your record cleaned — especially if you’ve ever been on his TV show or were prosecuted by one of his foes.
President Trump has started handing out pardons to people with very specific personal connections. And while the Constitution gives the president that power, he should know that he’s playing with fire.
Trump on Thursday gave a full pardon to conservative gadfly and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, convicted in 2014 of recruiting two friends to act as straw donors to a New York campaign for the US Senate.
Then he said he’s strongly considering commuting the sentence of Illinois ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, now serving a 14-year term for numerous blatant acts of corruption — including trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. He also said he might pardon lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, who served time for lying to investigators about a stock sale.
Blagojevich was on “Celebrity Appearance”; Stewart hosted an “Apprentice” spinoff.
And D’Souza was prosecuted by then-US Attorney Preet Bharara (who became an anti-Trump obsessive after the prez fired him), Stewart by another Trump nemesis, James Comey; and Blagojevich by close Comey pal Patrick Fitzgerald.
Completing the circle, Fitzgerald also prosecuted Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Dick Cheney aide recently pardoned by Trump. That pardon, at least, was wholly justified (we’d long called for such a move), as was Trump’s posthumous pardon of boxing champion Jack Johnson.
But he’s also pardoned anti-immigrant hero Joe Arpaio (who didn’t remotely deserve it) and a former Navy sailor found with classified photos on his cellphone who’d compared his case to Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.
Nearly all these pardons were issued without Department of Justice vetting — something last done by President Bill Clinton in his last day in office, and widely seen then as a flagrant abuse of power.
Trump needs to stop winging it and set up some far less personal process — or be seen as using pardons merely to reward his cronies and punish his foes. A long string of self-indulgent pardons can only raise serious worries that he’ll start making abitrary use of more fearsome presidential powers.