Robert Mueller moves to quash Donald Trump’s federal pardon power

| 12:51 pm EDT October 3, 2017
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In a sign of how aggressively Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is progressing, he’s already reached a point where he has to contend with the possibility that Donald Trump may begin trying to pardon his own co-conspirators so they won’t flip on him. Trump can theoretically try to preemptively pardon anyone at any time, but it’s likely he’ll wait until he feels he has no choice. Accordingly, Mueller’s team is moving to try to quash Trump’s pardon power.

It’s already well established that the president cannot pardon anyone for state level crimes, and Mueller is going that route when it comes to at least some of Trump’s underlings. But he also has a prosecutor named Michael Dreeben who’s working on figuring out how to prevent Trump from using federal pardons as well, according to a new Bloomberg report (link). It’s never been Constitutionally established whether the president can pardon his co-conspirators to motivate them not to testify against him, or pardon his family members, or pardon himself – because no president has ever tried to do these things, and thus it’s never been tested in court.

The Bloomberg article makes a point of spelling out Dreeben’s long history of arguing cases before the Supreme Court, and how Chief Justice John Roberts has been impressed with his arguments. The article doesn’t explicitly say it, but the reality is that Donald Trump’s attempted federal pardons will ultimately end up in front of the Supreme Court. In fact the entire article reads like an intentional hint to Trump’s co-conspirators that Trump probably can’t save them even if he tries.

The first pardon out of the gate will set the legal precedent one way or the other. If Mueller and Dreeben can win that first court battle, it’ll mean Trump can’t pardon himself out of this on any level – and it’ll signal to everyone involved that it’s time to flip on him. It’s why Dreeben is working his way through every inch of pardon case law to try to figure out how to quash Trump’s pardon power in this case altogether.