I don’t know that the president can pardon himself. In the DOJ’s standing opinion he cannot. They theorized under Nixon the proper course would be to invoke the 25th amendment for temporary transfer of power to the VP, have the VP issue the pardon, then the president resume office, pardoned. The theory is the fundamental rule of justice that one cannot be the judge in their own case. https://www.justice.gov/d9/olc/opinions/1974/08/31/op-olc-supp-v001-p0370_0.pdf
I am nto making excuses for trump (did you just meet me??)....just that everyone gets so overowrked on indictments.....lets get an actual conviction already.....its been 3 years of investigations.
The Constitution governs. Not the DOJ opinions. You are correct in when you say you do not know. As legal theory and practice one can make a knee-jerk argument that one cannot be judge in their own case, and similarly not in the case of immediate family and so on and so forth. In practice, presidents have and do pardon immediate family members, best buddies, people who have made contributions to the president in order to get pardons, etc and no one has been able to stop it because the power of the president is considered to be unlimited. All of those pardons are contrary to "the fundamental rule of justice" but there they are. Bill Clinton pardoned his brother and go him out of prison. And he pardoned Marc Rich who was a fugitive and on the run but had been one of his major campaign contributors. Boom! About as biased as you can get and being a judge in his own interests. The Constitution does not necessarily tidy everything up in all matters, nor does that mean the DOJ and others can project on to it what the framers should or should not have done to fill in the blanks. An in-house opinion by the DOJ is just one more in-house opinion. The analogies over to the judicial system are of limited value. The president is not acting as a judge when he grants pardons. He is exercising executive power that the constitution has given him.
Hardly. As stated, an opinion is an opinion. There is much doubt whether the president can pardon himself.
The US is chock full of lawyers and a lot of "rich" people get away with stuff. For example, OJ was obviously guilty of murder but he got acquitted in criminal court. There is no doubt in my mind Trump's been guilty of sexual assault numerous times in his life. A married man who continually acts in this way has no moral compass and shouldn't be elected. His businesses frequently go under or are found to be acting on the fringes of the law ( likely not even that ). He hired all his close friends and family when he was President ( nepotism at it's finest ). None of his foreign policy as President worked out well ( see Taliban in power, no agreement with Iran , his buddy Putin is committing war crimes, trade deals contributed to supply chain issues and inflation ). And he refused to accept his election loss and egged on all sorts of people to commit acts of treason for him. I have no idea why he's not charged yet but there is a long line of crooked American rich guys who got away with a lot of shit in recent decades. Including some guys Trump pardoned.
You'd think as the evidence just piles up more and more people would just let go of their fantasies of Trump being a suitable, capable leader. But you did elect George W. Bush twice and DeSantis is basically Trump Version 2 an actor portraying Trump.