Go rogue on Manafort pardon

Aides expect Trump to go rogue on Manafort pardon

The president's comments are being read as a signal that he wants to ignore his lawyers and exonerate his former campaign chairman.

By NANCY COOK

President Donald Trump’s lawyers and a cadre of informal White House advisers claim they’ve convinced him not to pardon Paul Manafort — but White House officials expect the president to do it anyway.

The president’s characterization of his former campaign chairman as a victim and “brave man” is being read by aides as a signal that Trump wants to use his unilateral authority to issue pardons to absolve Manafort, according to eight current and former administration officials and outside advisers.

“Trump is setting it up. He’s referring to the investigation as a ‘witch hunt’ and saying this never would have happened to an aide to Hillary Clinton,” said one former campaign official.

Three senior administration aides said the president has not expressed to them directly any immediate intention of pardoning Manafort, who was convicted earlier this week on eight counts of felony tax evasion and bank fraud. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, told The Washington Post on Thursday that the president had agreed not to pardon Manafort, who faces a second trial on lobbying violations in Washington next month, until after the midterms if at all. Giuliani did not return a call for comment.

Members of the president’s informal group of outside advisers, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have stepped in over the past few weeks to caution the president against exonerating Manafort before the midterms.

“He certainly does not need to do it. The things Manafort has been convicted of have nothing to do with Trump,” Gingrich told POLITICO. “The president thinks Manafort’s biggest crime was running the Trump campaign. If he had run the Clinton campaign, then he would have gotten immunity and never would have had any problems.”

White House counsel Don McGahn is also dead set against a presidential pardon of Manafort, according to one administration official — though a person close to McGahn said that he and the president had not discussed the issue.

Gingrich and others are telling the president it would cause a political firestorm that establishment Republicans and Democrats alike would rally against, and would make Trump look like he is dangling a quid pro quo to potential witnesses in the myriad investigations involving the Trump campaign, creating further legal exposure for the president.

Trump’s longtime attorney and fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty this week in New York to charges of fraud and campaign finance violations related to payments he made to two women — porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — before the 2016 election to silence their claims about having had affairs with Trump.

Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg has been granted immunity in that investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter, a deal first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to comment on the president’s plans for pardons, pointing to her remarks at a press briefing on Wednesday. There, she indicated that pardoning Manafort “is not something that has been up for discussion.” She later specified in a statement that the matter had not been up for discussion “inside the White House.”

But it remains an open question whether the president — who tends to trust his instincts and make decisions on the fly — will listen to this collective advice as the special investigation burrows deeper into Trump world and the president feels increasingly isolated. In the past year and half, the president has ignored key advisers on a range of issues, from firing former FBI Director James Comey to banning transgender troops from the military.

“Certainly, the president has the authority to pardon Manafort, but I think it would be a major mistake,” said Ed Rollins, a longtime Republican operative who also ran the pro-Trump group, Great America PAC. “If a pardon comes pre the mid-terms, it will become a major issue in the campaigns. Equally important, if a pardon comes at the completion of the criminal process, it will taint the president’s legacy, and certainly make a farce out of his promises to ‘Drain the swamp!’”

Ever since Trump discovered that he could unilaterally pardon individuals, aides say he’s been thrilled by that level of unchecked power. Similar to signing an executive order, the pardons allow Trump to act quickly without the constraints imposed by tight voting margins in Congress, or by the judicial system.

“It is a matter of constitutional law that there is nothing Congress could do to fetter his power to pardon people. He can do it literally with the stroke of a pen, and he can do it any which way he wants to,” said Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University who specializes in sentencing law and policy. “This is one of the last vestiges of a monarchy — of giving the president this broad clemency power.”

Trump has issued pardons to I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney; former Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a longtime supporter of the president; and conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza.

Most recently, at the suggestion of Kim Kardashian, he pardoned and commuted the sentence of Alice Johnson, a grandmother convicted of drug trafficking. She was released from prison in June.

Although the president constitutionally has the power to pardon whomever he chooses, the process of selecting who receives a pardon has in previous administrations involved lawyers from the White House counsel’s office and applications submitted through the Department of Justice.

The pardon process in this White House has been far more ad hoc — much the way this White House has similarly discarded routines for hiring and vetting political appointees or making complex policy decisions.

“He certainly has been much more inclined to use the pardon in a freewheeling and personal fashion, so far, without going through the normal Justice Department process,” said Margaret Love, who served U.S. pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997. “His grants are not unprecedented, but the process he has used and the way these cases are coming to attention are quite unique.”