Trump Privately Proposes Wave of High-Level Jan. 6 Pardons
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Donald Trump has privately told confidants that, should he be re-elected president, he could pardon any of his allies if they face charges from the Biden-era Justice Department in two major probes, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone.
Since last summer, the former president has been telling some of those close to him that the pardons would be for higher-level people and could come early in his time in office, effectively wiping away a multi-year effort to hold powerful people and their cohorts legally accountable for their actions during and after Trump’s first term.
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“This would be like hitting the delete-key on all of [the] DOJ’s work on these investigations — and be an opening shot in his next war on the ‘Deep State,’” says one of the sources, adding it would be part of Trump “cleaning house” at the start of his second term.
“The idea was that he can just pardon everybody [if] he’s president again … That he can do it ‘fast’ and early on in his [new] term,” the source continues. “He was not talking about the [Jan. 6 rioters and] prisoners, it was about people working on post-election activities and on the documents. All the different ‘witch hunts.’”
The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to relay private conversations. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
The Justice Department is conducting two main probes into Trump and his allies. The first is into the twice-impeached former president’s activities surrounding the 2020 election, in which he stoked doubts and spread lies about the results and fueled a “stop the steal” movement that culminated in the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. That inquiry also likely extends to Trump’s efforts to overturn the race in court, probing whether his legal team broke the law in their efforts to get courts to reverse the decision, or whether Trump himself broke the law while pressuring election officials to tip the contest in his favor.
The second probe involves sensitive documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida, as the feds look at whether Trump and others engaged in criminal activity by taking certain materials out of the federal chain of custody and into his private residence. In the latter investigation, Trump’s critics have accused him of engaging in obstruction by attempting to thwart the federal inquiry.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend, Trump told a Newsmax correspondent that he will not leave the 2024 presidential race if he gets criminally charged, claiming an indictment would “enhance” his poll numbers among GOP voters. (To be fair, he might have a point.)
The proposal for early-term pardons for high-level officials adds a new layer to Trump’s broadcasted plans to shield his team from legal accountability. At a Jan. 2022 rally, he teased potential pardons for Jan. 6 rioters. “If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly,” Trump said then in a speech outside Houston. (Trump recently contributed audio for a group of incarcerated Jan. 6 prisoners for a recording called “Justice for All.”)
Not everyone in the Trump orbit is impressed with his idea for issuing rapid pardons should he return to the Oval Office. Nor are many of the senior veterans of his administration, including those who helped defend him and his White House against the feds.
Under the Constitution, “it’s undeniable that, if elected yet again (heaven forbid), [Trump] can issue all these possible pardons related to the efforts to cling to power and even the Mar-a-Lago classified documents. That would, of course, be a travesty,” Ty Cobb, a former top Trump White House lawyer during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, says in an interview. “And it underscores yet again my firm anxiety about our current democracy … because the man is a complete narcissist and inherently evil.”
Others are skeptical Trump would stick his neck out for his allies. “Trump could have done all of this before he left office originally, but was too concerned about the second impeachment and his own reelection campaign when he knew he was leaving office, so he left advisers, lawyers, and Jan. 6 defendants on the field,” says one person close to Trump. “Why trust he’s going to do something now when, if it’s politically expedient for him, he didn’t before? He demands loyalty, but doesn’t provide it reciprocally to his own team.”
The question of pardons is not limited to Trump’s cronies and supporters: During his presidency, he repeatedly mused about pardoning himself — and alleging he had the authority to do so.
Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University law school professor who has written extensively on presidential pardons, says it’s unclear whether Trump would be allowed to pardon himself. “The bottom line is that nobody knows for sure, and anyone who says he definitely can or definitely cannot is lying,” Kalt tells Rolling Stone. “When people ask me if the president can pardon himself, my answer is: ‘He can try.’ “
Among other arguments, Kalt says that the U.S. legal system has a general principle of forbidding people from being the judge in their own case, and while a pardon isn’t the same thing as judging a case, he thinks the norm would hold. But he noted a court could find the opposite, as the Constitution grants the president the right to issue pardons, and it does not contain a carve-out forbidding a president from pardoning him or herself.
Trump is no stranger to politically connected pardons. With months left before leaving office, the former president dished out clemency to a host of allies. That included one for Paul Manafort, chairman of his 2016 campaign, who was serving a 47-month sentence for eight felony convictions. He also gave a full pardon to Roger Stone, who’d tried to thwart the federal investigation into ties between Trump and Russia and was convicted of eight felonies. And then there’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who’d been charged with defrauding donors out of more than $1 million in a phony scheme to build Trump’s border wall. Hours before leaving office, in one of his final acts as president, Trump granted him a full pardon.
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