Even before speculation began to swirl that President Donald Trump might pardon convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, it was clear presidential pardons are a problem crying out for a solution.
Almost every president since Bill Clinton has issued pardons that were questionable at best and unethical and indefensible at worst.
Clinton earned well-deserved criticism for issuing a third of his 450 pardons on the last day of his presidency. The one that received special — and, again, well-deserved scorn — was the one that went to Marc Rich, who had fled the country to evade bank fraud charges.
Rich’s ex-wife, who advocated for her former spouse, had made substantial financial contributions to the establishment of the Clinton Presidential Library and to the U.S. Senate campaign of Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The whole thing smelled.
Clinton’s successor in the White House, George W. Bush, favored issuing pardons to people who had broken the law for ideological or partisan purposes.
Perhaps the most famous one was Bush’s commutation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison sentence for, among other things, making public the identity of an undercover CIA agent who was married to a Bush critic. Bush apparently didn’t think almost getting a person serving this nation killed while playing political hardball merited serious prison time.
Bush’s decision helped establish a precedent.
Future presidents — one in particular — would point to him when they wanted to justify issuing get-out-of-jail cards to political allies who had broken the law. That president, Trump, drove home the point by pardoning Libby during his first term.
More on Trump in a moment.
Barack Obama issued many pardons and commuted many sentences, but the one that generated the most controversy was for Chelsea Manning, the former military intelligence analyst who leaked classified information to WikiLeaks. Some quarters hailed Manning as a whistleblower. Others vilified her as a traitor.
The salient point, though, is that a court of law determined the latter view was the most accurate one and Obama elevated his judgment over that of the legal process.
Trump took things to a whole new level.
During his first term in office, he pardoned political allies — Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, etc. — who had been convicted of obstructing justice and breaking various other laws. He always seemed to kick them loose when they began to hint that they’d be willing to cooperate with investigations into Trump’s own conduct.
The pardons he issued them all but shut down those investigations and made other potential witnesses far more likely to clam up.
Trump even publicly flirted with the idea of preemptively pardoning himself, despite counsel advice from even the most conservative legal scholars that doing so would provoke a constitutional crisis.
Joe Biden played Trump’s game. When the Democrats lost the 2024 election and members of Biden’s family, blood and political, feared reprisals from a vindictive Trump, Biden issued a slew of questionable pardons, including ones for his son Hunter and several aides and allies.
Restored to the presidency, Trump began his second term by issuing blanket pardons for the Jan. 2, 2021, insurrectionists — thus establishing that attacking this country was not that big a deal.
Continuing his practice of using the presidential pardon power to serve his personal and political interests, Trump now seems to be pondering whether to let Maxwell, who might be able to implicate the president in the late Jeffrey Epstein’s activities as a sexual predator of minors, off the hook.
This shouldn’t be a surprise.
Trump is, after all, Trump, a man who will use any trick to evade being held accountable for any wrong he might have done.
But the fact is that he’s not the only president who has used the power to commute sentences or pardon individuals in questionable way.
Our courts have firm and established protocols in place, many if not most of them there to presume innocence and protect the rights of the accused.
The notion that any single person can override the judicial process undercuts the idea of law itself. When the decision to override that process can hinge on whether a convicted person has access to the president through money, via family connections or by doing political scut work undermines the concept of justice itself.
Maybe Donald Trump will pardon Ghislaine Maxwell to get himself out of a jam.
Maybe he won’t.
But he shouldn’t have that option.
No president should.