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As president, could Trump pardon himself?
Probably not. The Hush Money case is a state case, not a federal case. Presidential pardons (up till this point) are only valid for federal crimes.
Doesnt matter. The case is dead. By the time he is out of office, he'd be too old.
He was never going to prison to begin with, even if Kamala won. Some lawyer is gonna argue its unsafe for a former president to be in prison and supreme court would side with the trump lawyer, so he'd at worst, be in house arrest for like maybe a few months.
I would settle for house arrest with no access to social media posting.
Maybe in the alternate timeline where Kamala won. Here, we get a demented old man ranting on live tv with the nuclear button on his twitchy fingers...
What, with his Secret Service bodyguards?
Putting aside the specific matter of jurisdiction (state level cases require state level pardons), legal experts widely agree that the concept of a self-pardon does not exist in pretty much any body of law, ever, because it basically refutes the idea of there being a body of law.
But, given that the supreme court decided that the president is a god-king emperor, the fact that he can't legally do it no longer really matters.
That's what I was wondering about
The answer, as I understand it, is basically "Who the fuck knows?"
Every serious legal analyst seems to agree that the SC's immunity decision is, uh... I think the technical term is "Total fucking lunacy." It makes no sense, destroys a lot of existing legal precedent, and generally overturns many of the foundational principles of the US constitution. It's batshit crazy, and the actual terms of the immunity and how it's defined are astonishingly vague.
What the president can or cannot do right now is more or less "??????"
The SC case can be summarized as "Can the president commit crimes?" "Probably. Tell us what crime it is and we will decide later"
Authoritarians have only one reason: "Because I said so."
So does money being the same as speech. So does presidential immunity.
There seems to be a pattern here.
Not the state case. He has the power at the federal level only.
Trump accepting the pardon from himself means he's guilty but gets no consequences, sort of maintaining the status quo.
Accepting a pardon does not require an admission of guilt. That's a myth. There is no part of the pardon process where you are required to admit guilt
In fact, pardons have been issued because the pardoning authority determined that a person has been wrongly convicted. And at the federal level, general pardons have also been issued. In the case of a general pardon, if you accept one, what are you pleading guilty to? Every possible potential crime covered by the pardon?
Garland was dicta. It was also bullshit.