US presidents use the pardon tool very illegitimately

By Mark Dankof

Laurence Tribe's criticisms of Donald Trump in the presidential pardoning process may well have some validity, but they don't have much credibility and the reason that they don't is that Tribe proceeds to ignore a series of situations in American history, not dissimilar from this one, and in some cases far worse than this one.

I'm referring to a February 18, 2001 article in the Los Angeles Times chronicling the Bill Clinton pardoning of Marc Rich, who had committed something like $48 million in tax fraud; he had done a series of other things of a criminal nature that are listed in that article but most importantly Clinton's payoff to Mark Rich was clearly a payoff to the Israeli Mossad and the Israeli government and the Jewish Lobby in the United States who wanted that pardon to go through.

So in this particular situation Tribe's criticism of Donald Trump's use of these pardons may have some degree of merit in some circumstances. I am distressed that Donald Trump pardoned these Blackwater war criminals who murdered these 17 Iraqis and in some cases were even murdering children as a part of those 17, who were brutally murdered without any degree of provocation or justification whatsoever.

I think that's clearly Trump's most hideous action in these pardons, but we go back to the Clinton pardon of Mark Rich, and we go back to a series of things that can be demonstrated easily when you do a Google search on presidential pardons, it's clear that a number of chief executives of the United States have used the pardon tool very illegitimately when it suited their own partisan or political purposes.

There is another question here of what it is that Laurence Tribe does not talk about, well, there would be a much more solid ground it seems to me in prosecuting Donald Trump and a series of other chief executives of the United States, especially since 1992 in regard to war crimes.

Mr. Trump's clear commissioning of the murder of General Soleimani, and clearly Mr. Trump's involvement in the more recent assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Fakhrizadeh are examples of this, and in this particular case Tribe says nothing about these angles, neither does he say anything about the totally unconstitutional use of a series of American presidents of war powers when they have involved the United States militarily in all kinds of situations, without a congressional declaration of war, or even an activity of the UN Security Council.

So in this regard, Trump clearly is vulnerable on these charges of misuse of his pardon powers. But then, so is Bill Clinton especially with the Mark Rich pardon as well as a series of others.

There are a whole series of chief executives who've done all kinds of nefarious things just in my lifetime alone but in terms of the larger issues of war and peace committing the United States militarily to foreign countries where there is no congressional declaration of war or no authorization of the UN Security Council, and clearly where you have a situation where you have presidents involved, even publicly in the case of Mr. Trump and claiming responsibility for assassinating a foreign General of a country we're not at war with, these are areas where I would like to hear Mr. Tribe pronounces judgments on some of these activities, which involve not only Mr. Trump but a series of other chief executives both Republicans and Democrats.

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Mark Dankof, a former US Senate candidate, is a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas. He recorded this article for the Press TV website.

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