{"id":15436,"date":"2020-12-29T00:19:02","date_gmt":"2020-12-29T05:19:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=15436"},"modified":"2024-09-11T16:03:01","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T20:03:01","slug":"gerald-ford-and-the-perversion-of-presidential-pardons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/29\/gerald-ford-and-the-perversion-of-presidential-pardons\/","title":{"rendered":"Gerald Ford and the Perversion of Presidential Pardons"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Conservative, December 29, 2020<\/h3>\n

Gerald Ford and the Perversion of Presidential Pardons<\/span><\/a><\/h1>\n
\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

In pardoning Nixon, the 38th president opened the floodgates to boundless executive power.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In his final weeks in office, President Donald Trump is outraging the media and many critics with deluges of dubious pardons. Last Tuesday was \u201cNo Corrupt Congressman or Iraqi Child Killer Left<\/a> Behind Day.\u201d\u00a0 On Wednesday, he pardoned his 2016 campaign chief, Roger Stone,\u00a0 Jared Kushner\u2019s father (convicted of tax fraud), and dozens of others. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) responded by calling to strip the pardon power from the Constitution: \u201cOnce one party allows the pardon power to become a tool of criminal enterprise<\/a>, its danger to democracy outweighs its utility as an instrument of justice.\u201d\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

\n

But the potential damage from Trump\u2019s pardons thus far is small potatoes compared to the most damaging pardon in U.S. history issued by one of the Washington establishment\u2019s favorite presidents, Gerald Ford. On September 8, 1974, Ford issued a pardon<\/a> of former president Richard Nixon that was so sweeping that it practically condemned future generations of Americans to being governed by lawless presidents.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nixon had resigned the previous month after the House Judiciary Committee had voted to impeach him. The first article of the bill of impeachment<\/a> focused on Nixon\u2019s involvement in the coverup of the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by agents of his Committee to Re-Elect the President.<\/p>\n

Ford, in his televised speech to the nation<\/a> on the pardon on September 8, 1974, repeatedly stressed his devotion to the Constitution and to \u201cequal justice for all Americans.\u201d \u00a0 Ford lamented that Nixon might have difficulty to \u201cobtain a fair trial by jury in any jurisdiction\u201d and that he \u201cwould be cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society.\u201d\u00a0 In lieu of offering any evidence that Nixon could not get a fair trial, Ford insisted that Nixon\u2019s suffering and fate \u201cdeeply troubles every decent and every compassionate person.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps most bizarrely, Ford declared that, if Nixon were put on trial, \u201cthe credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps Ford, a career politician, confused placing \u201cfree institutions\u201d with \u201crulers on a pedestal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many people assumed that President Ford pardoned Nixon only for Watergate. In reality, Ford\u2019s pardon was so broad <\/a>\u2014 forgiving Nixon for any and every possible crime he may have committed \u2014 that it would have exempted Nixon even from charges of genocide:<\/p>\n

Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969, through August 9, 1974.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ford\u2019s pardon closed the book on holding Nixon culpable for his crimes against the Constitution, Americans, and millions of other people around the world. Ford justified his pardon by claiming that criminally prosecuting Nixon would banish<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe tranquility\u00a0to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Ford\u2019s action made it easier for subsequent presidents to disturb \u201ctranquility\u201d and practically everything else.\u00a0 If Nixon had been publicly tried and a full accounting of his abuses made to the American public, it may have been more difficult for subsequent presidents to cover up their crimes. Politicians remembering Nixon\u2019s punishment and humiliation might have been slower to lie the nation into unnecessary foreign wars. If Ford was determined to pardon the man who appointed him Vice President, he should have had the decency to wait until Americans could see the evidence of the abuses committed during Nixon\u2019s reign.\u00a0 As liberal journalist Matthew Yglesias observed in 2006, Ford\u2019s blanket pardon helped obscure the fact that Nixon \u201chad been spear-heading a broad-based criminal conspiracy aimed at suppressing the anti-war movement<\/a> and other civil society manifestations of opposition to Nixon\u2019s policies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford\u2019s pardon proclaimed a new doctrine in American law and politics \u2014 that one president can absolve another president for anything and everything.<\/strong>\u00a0 No wonder that Nixon told interviewer David Frost <\/a>a few years later that \u201cwhen the president does it, that means it is not illegal.\u201d\u00a0 Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied, \u201cBy definition?\u201d Nixon answered, \u201cExactly. Exactly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford\u2019s expansive use of the pardon helped pave the way for George H.W. Bush\u2019s Iran-Contra pardons <\/a>\u00a0which largely demolished the investigation of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. On Christmas Eve 1992, Bush pardoned six Reagan<\/a> administration officials for their roles in Iran Contra<\/a>, the illegal arms-for-hostage deal that blighted the final years of the Reagan presidency. Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was scheduled to go on trial two weeks later on charges of lying to Congress.<\/p>\n

Walsh denounced the pardons<\/a> as part of a \u201ccover-up\u201d and said that they undermined his investigation of possible criminal conduct by Bush himself. Walsh also reported that Bush\u2019s pardons prevented Bush from having to testify in court and face \u201csearching questions\u201d on his own conduct<\/a>.\u00a0 Bush\u2019s pardons greatly reduced the likelihood that his co-conspirators would ever turn state\u2019s evidence against him<\/a>.\u00a0 The presidential pardons of Walsh\u2019s targets were approved by Attorney General Bill Barr, who resigned as Trump\u2019s Attorney General effective last week but whose recommendations may have had profound influence on the latest and forthcoming Trump pardons.\u00a0 University of California professor Eric Rauchway declared that Bush\u2019s \u201cpardons did more to enable future criminal<\/a> presidencies even than Gerald Ford\u2019s pardon of Richard Nixon.\u201d\u00a0 If Walsh\u2019s investigation had led to Bush\u2019s conviction, the Bush brand name might have been sufficiently damaged that no other Bush could have ascended to the presidency.<\/p>\n

President Bill Clinton built on those precedents to issue a deluge of pardons in his final day of office, including for two former cabinet members, his brother Roger, fellow Whitewater operative Susan McDougal (whose silence helped save Clinton), and former congressman Mel Reynolds<\/a> (convicted of having sex with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer as well as bank fraud and wire fraud).\u00a0 Slate<\/i> denounced Clinton\u2019s for fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, who had been indicted for tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, and trading with the enemy, as \u201cthe most unjust presidential pardon in American history.\u201d Rich\u2019s pardon was facilitated by Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder<\/a>, who slipped the pardon effort past normal Justice Department checks and balances. Rich\u2019s pardon was supported by the chief of the Anti-Defamation League (after Rich pledged to give $100,000<\/a> to the organization), the chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Museum<\/a>, and many other organizations. Responding to the uproar over that pardon, Clinton justified the pardon in a New York Times op-ed in part due to the lobbying of \u201cmany present and former high-ranking Israeli officials<\/a> of both major political parties,\u201d who stressed Rich\u2019s services to the Mossad. Clinton was indignant at suggestions that Rich\u2019s former wife\u2019s $450,000 contribution to the Clinton presidential library had any influence on the pardon. A congressional investigation concluded that Clinton abused his pardon power by offering \u201cit up to wealthy fugitives whose money<\/a> had already enabled them to permanently escape American justice. Few other abuses could so thoroughly undermine public trust in government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford\u2019s former chief of staff,\u00a0 Dick Cheney, brought the absolutist spirit of Ford\u2019s pardon of Nixon into the George W. Bush administration.\u00a0 Thirty years after Nixon resigned, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales claimed that the \u201ccommander-in-chief\u201d override <\/a>entitled the president to violate federal law.\u00a0 That doctrine helped spawn a worldwide torture regime.\u00a0 After the New York Times<\/i> finally exposed Bush\u2019s National Security Administration illegal wiretapping regime in late 2005, Bush responded the following month by boasting about his \u201cTerrorist Surveillance Program\u201d in his State of the Union Address<\/a> and receiving standing ovations from Republicans members of Congress. Bush clearly felt that he was legally untouchable regardless of what he did (though he was smart enough to not brag that he could get away with shooting<\/a> someone on Fifth Avenue).<\/p>\n

President Barack Obama is rarely included in lists of pardon abusers but he and his Attorney General Eric Holder effectively pardoned all the war crimes and other atrocities committed by top Bush administration officials.\u00a0 Obama promised during his 2008 presidential campaign that he would \u201cimmediately review\u201d Bush-era torture crimes because<\/a> \u201cnobody is above the law.\u201d\u00a0 Instead, the Obama administration proffered one excuse after another to suppress the vast majority of torture evidence relying on the \u201cState Secrets\u201d doctrine<\/a> and administrative decrees, as well as throttling all torture-related lawsuits.\u00a0 The ACLU\u2019s Jameel Jaffer summarized Obama\u2019s policy: \u201cThe greater the abuse<\/a>, the more important it is that it should remain secret.\u201d\u00a0 Obama and Holder effectively invented a new legal category\u2013\u201cgood faith torture\u201d<\/a>\u2014and summarily ruled that it applied to all U.S. government officials. Thanks to Obama and Holder\u2019s \u201dget out of jail free\u201d card, former president George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney<\/a> could publicly boast in 2010 about having ordered torture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to know what further pardon surprises Trump will spring in his final weeks in office. The New York Times<\/i> reported earlier this month that Trump has discussed with advisors issuing pardons to his three eldest children<\/a> and Rudolph Giuliani.\u00a0 Will he take the\u00a0audacious step of issuing himself a Gerald-Ford-all-inclusive pardon for all he has done since January 20, 2017?\u00a0 That might be another \u201ckraken release\u201d that plays as badly as Sidney Powell\u2019s efforts to overturn the election.<\/p>\n

Ford\u2019s blanket pardon of Nixon helped turn America into an Impunity Democracy in which rulers pay no price for their misdeeds.\u00a0 Presidential pardons often preclude truth: the odds of learning the facts about official outrages decline by roughly 98% after the threat of prosecution is removed. While the latest media outrage focuses on who is receiving pardons from Trump, the real danger remains the nearly boundless power of the White House.\u00a0 When presidents are formally permitted to trample the law, they become the most dangerous criminals in the land.<\/strong><\/p>\n

James Bovard<\/strong>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/i>Lost Rights<\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>Attention Deficit Democracy<\/a>, and\u00a0<\/i>Public Policy Hooligan<\/a>. He is also a\u00a0<\/i>USA Today\u00a0columnist. Follow him on Twitter\u00a0<\/i>@JimBovard<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Conservative, December 29, 2020 Gerald Ford and the Perversion of Presidential Pardons by James Bovard In pardoning Nixon, the 38th president opened the floodgates to boundless executive power. In his final weeks in office, President Donald Trump is outraging the media and many critics with deluges of dubious pardons. Last Tuesday was \u201cNo Corrupt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2585,464,51,432,2582,292,881,2583,1994,2584,2586,245,38,12,291],"class_list":["post-15436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anti-defamation-league","tag-atrocities","tag-clinton","tag-eric-holder","tag-ford","tag-genocide","tag-impunity","tag-iran-contra","tag-lawrence-walsh","tag-marc-rich","tag-mossad","tag-nixon","tag-obama","tag-torture","tag-watergate"],"yoast_head":"\nGerald Ford and the Perversion of Presidential Pardons - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/29\/gerald-ford-and-the-perversion-of-presidential-pardons\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gerald Ford and the Perversion of Presidential Pardons - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"American Conservative, December 29, 2020 Gerald Ford and the Perversion of Presidential Pardons by James Bovard In pardoning Nixon, the 38th president opened the floodgates to boundless executive power. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15436"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20444,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15436\/revisions\/20444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}