The Self-Pardon Is Coming

It’s only a matter of time before we wake up one morning and open our newspapers — or web browsers, for you newfangled, tech-savvy youngsters — to read that Donald Trump has pardoned himself.

I’m not saying it will work. But I’m saying he will try.

Trump has been openly inquiring about pardoning himself as far back as 2017. Having apparently skipped high school civics, he infamously claimed that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” And in June of 2018, in the midst of the Russia probe, he addressed the issue in public, tweeting: “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.”

Yes, and numerous hockey experts have stated that I am the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer. After all, I’ve asserted it, so it must be true. (Most famous: my triple hat trick in a 9–0 shutout of Toe Blake and the Habs in 1942.)

So it’s not like this idea appeared out of nowhere this week. We’ve all known for sometime that Trump intends to use every lever at his disposal to insulate himself from legal reckoning for his crimes, even a lever that most legal scholars believe is unconstitutional.

The much feared prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, one of Robert Mueller’s top lieutenants in the Russiagate probe, put it very simply in explaining why he…