First tweet to greet me this morning (from DocDawg of Daily Kos):
Next order of Christmas Eve business: were there more pardons as I slept? (Checks Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.)
Nope. Just more lunatic chatter about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Did you know Communists took over America? Did you know you are one of them? Did you know Vice President Mike Pence will not “receive” electoral vote reports from “six fraudulently certified States“? (Does Pence know?) Not to mention Trump issuing threats to attack Iran.
Trump himself is too busy golfing in Florida to fight for the $2,000 per person covid lifeline he just demanded from Congress, and he is too busy to pass the defense authorization bill. But he is not too busy to threaten to start a war from his tee box.
“Complete clusterf—,” a top Republican Hill aide told Politico, meaning the aborted legislation.
What Trump has found time for is granting pardons and commutations to, among others, four Blackwater mercenaries who massacred civilians, three corrupt former Republican congressmen, and two former Border Patrol agents who shot fleeing suspects. Among the 26 partridges and pear trees in Wednesday’s tally are longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Charles Kushner, father to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared.
Foreign agent and former sometime national security adviser Mike Flynn got a pardon. So did “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos, and more. The Washington Post lists the pardons Trump has issued since the November election.
Among the lower-profile pardons: one for Stephanie Mohr, a former Maryland police officer. Mohr was convicted for setting her K-9 partner on an unarmed homeless man who had surrendered to police during a burglary stakeout. Ricardo G. Mendez, a Mexican national, was not a suspect. He and another man had been sleeping on the roof of a printing shop in Takoma Park. She served ten years for a felony civil rights felony. The dog “bit a chunk out of the man’s leg.”
The New York Times Editorial Board believes Trump “has made a mockery of mercy, doling out clemency to some of the most deplorable people in the country, an alarming number of whom happen to be his friends, while ignoring tens of thousands of more deserving applicants.” Trump has pardoned “a rogues’ gallery of wrongdoers who shouldn’t have been on anyone’s mercy list.”
But of course he would. Immediate family members are next, we suspect.
The process needs review and reform, the Board suggests, and the incoming Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration should do so: institute a clemency board, set clear, consistent standards, etc. Biden could undo some of the damage inflicted by harsh, criminal-sentencing standards he himself helped institute as a senator:
He can’t undo the damage these federal laws have inflicted, but he can begin to repair it, and his own legacy on this issue, by reforming the pardon power from the ground up.
Until Biden takes the oath of office, Trump will continue to lay waste to the government he misled using the the powers he has misused for the last four years. As with the last Republican administration replaced by a Democratic one, there is a cleanup on aisle everywhere waiting.
“The coal industry is back,” Trump told miners in Charleston, W.Va. in 2018. And plenty enough lumps of it for the stockings of every member of the incoming Biden administration.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here: