Donald Trump’s bribery-for-pardon scandal is exploding tonight

| 9:17 pm EST December 3, 2020
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When the news broke earlier this week that the DOJ was criminally investigating someone for allegedly bribing Donald Trump in exchange for clemency, it was shocking yet not at all surprising. The names were redacted, so it raised a lot of questions about who was involved. Now some of those names are getting filled in, and it’s ugly.

It turns out the five letter last name that ends in an “S” is in fact “Baras” – as in Hugh L. Baras, someone you’ve almost certainly never heard of. But here’s where it gets ugly for the Trump family. According to the New York Times, the two people who allegedly tried to arrange the pardon bribery were Donald Trump’s fundraiser Elliott Broidy and Jared Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell.

Innocent until proven guilty. But if it turns out these folks really did arrange a bribe in exchange for clemency, it’s going to raise all kinds of questions. Would Broidy have arranged this without getting his boss Trump’s approval first? Would Lowell have done this without running it past his client Kushner?

In other words, this is going to get ugly. If guilty, Broidy and Lowell could end up needing to seek Trump pardons themselves. But those pardons could conceivably be seen as a continuation of the fraudulent pardon scheme, which could result in their pardons being thrown out in court. So would they be better off simply cutting plea deals against bigger fish? If so, who are the bigger fish? At some point prosecutors are surely going to be interrogating Trump and Kushner about what they did or didn’t know. And if this bribery-for-pardon thing is now confirmed to have happened once during the Trump regime, just how many times did it happen?