Last week, Christmas came early for various disgraced GOP congressmen, presidential cronies who didn’t “rat,” and a latter-day Lt. William Calley, thanks to a flurry of pardons issued by President Trump. As the 25th approached, I half-expected “45” to wind up his clemency spree with a big present for himself. A Christmas Day self-pardon would have been a fitting capstone to the ‘Me’ Presidency”: “?On the first day of Christmas/my true love (me) gave to me/a pre-emptive pardon in a.…?”—eh, you know how it goes.
For whatever reason, Trump decided not to cross that particular Rubicon just yet. Instead, pardons went to son-in-law Jared’s dad, Charles Kushner (a big believer in family loyalty himself), Mueller-probe targets like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, and what the New York Times summed up as a passel of “convicted liars, corrupt congressmen and child-killing war criminals.” Harsh: but, as they say, where’s the lie?
As I noted on the Cato blog a few months ago, “Trump is hardly the only president in living memory to issue a self-dealing pardon… repay silence with clemency,” or even bestow presidential mercy on war criminals. Even so, this president “has amassed an overall record of shabbiness and self-dealing that ranks him among the worst abusers of the pardon power.”
Last week’s pardon of four Blackwater security contractors who shot up a Baghdad traffic circle in 2007 is particularly grotesque. The White House announcement deploys the sort of obfuscatory language that comes in handy when you don’t anyone to come away with a clear picture of who did what: “when the convoy attempted to establish a blockade outside the ‘Green Zone,’ the situation turned violent, which resulted in the unfortunate deaths and injuries of Iraqi civilians.” The “situation turned violent,” a federal jury in D.C. concluded in 2014, because Blackwater sniper Nicholas Slatten, unprovoked, shot the driver of a stopped car, kicking off a fusillade of gunfire from several of his colleagues. When the shooting stopped, 14 civilians, including two children, were dead.
Last week, CNN published an account of the Nisour Square massacre from one of the lead FBI investigators on the case. What he describes is stomach-churning:
At a break in the gunfire, likely during reloading, one of the little girls in the back seat yelled that “Ali has no hair.” When the shooting stopped and the Blackwater team began to move, Mohammed exited the driver door and opened a rear passenger door. Ali, who had been slumped against the door, fell into his father’s arms. Ali had been struck with a Blackwater round, which entered the rear driver side door and hit the boy in the head. As his father reached for his 9‑year-old son, Ali’s brains fell out onto the street and onto his father’s feet.
On occasion, presidents have commuted the sentences of convicted murderers from death to life imprisonment, but full pardons for that crime are vanishingly rare. Yet here’s another area where this president has been a norm-busting innovator: Slatten wasn’t even his first. In 2019 Trump pardoned one Army lieutenant, Michael Behenna, who shot an unarmed Iraqi prisoner and another, Clint Lorance, who ordered his men to fire on unarmed Afghan civilians.
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