By the time he pardoned America’s shortest-serving national security adviser, Michael Flynn, for lying to federal authorities about his contacts with Vladimir Putin’s regime, President Trump had already compiled an impressive list of dodgy dispensations. From a bigoted former Arizona sheriff to a corrupt ex-governor of Illinois to a onetime 49ers owner convicted in a bribery scandal, most of these figures are connected not by any miscarriage or excess of justice — the proper rationale for such an exercise of executive authority — but by having supported the president, his cronies and their particular prejudices.
Flynn, however, belongs to a special category of abuse of this presidential power: the kind meant to protect the president himself.
In that respect, Flynn was preceded only by Roger Stone, the veteran dirty trickster and Trump adviser who would have gone to prison — also for lying to and otherwise obstructing an investigation of his communications with Russia — if the president hadn’t commuted his sentence in July. Flynn’s pardon, announced on Twitter this week, means Trump has personally intervened to rescue the first man successfully prosecuted in what became Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as well as the last, Stone’s conviction having been the probe’s final act.
The Thanksgiving-eve pardon was only the last of Trump’s many extraordinary efforts to protect Flynn, a disgraced Obama administration military intelligence official turned pro-Trump firebrand, from his well-earned prosecution and punishment.
Soon after Flynn was caught covering up his conversations with Russia’s ambassador, the president unsuccessfully tried to bully then-FBI Director James Comey into “letting Flynn go,” as Mueller documented. Although Flynn admitted his guilt in court not once but twice, Attorney General William Barr went on to assign a prosecutor to re-investigate the case and have his Justice Department reverse course on the conviction, first arguing that the former adviser should be spared prison and ultimately moving to drop the charges entirely. The department’s about-face was so unusual and thinly justified that a federal judge held it up.
Similarly strenuous measures preceded Stone’s conviction and clemency. Trump publicly attacked the prosecutors, the presiding federal judge and the forewoman of the jury that convicted him. And four prosecutors resigned after the Justice Department rescinded their recommendation that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison.
Given that Flynn and Stone were both convicted of impeding an investigation that threatened Trump, who has publicly praised and personally engaged in similar obstruction, his motives could not be plainer. We should be prepared for more such protective pardons in the weeks ahead, possibly including an unprecedented self-pardon, to which Trump has dubiously asserted an “absolute right.” It would be a fitting finale for a president who has served himself at every turn and any cost.
— San Francisco Chronicle
