Lincoln's candlelight pardons
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Turning to a mass grant of clemency covering seventy-seven people, John Kiriakou began not with the recipients but with the constitutional power and its history.

The starting point

He conceded the authority without argument: the president has "the legal right, the constitutional right, to pardon anybody he wants."

Lincoln

Then came the historical case. "There are stories about Abraham Lincoln staying up late into the night and pardoning people by candlelight," Kiriakou said, "mostly deserters, because to desert from your army unit in the Civil War was a death sentence. You were to be executed for that."

The principle he attributes to Lincoln is a single sentence: "he said that no one should be executed for cowardice." So, in Kiriakou's account, "he would stay awake at night just signing pardons."

The image is doing specific work in the argument. Lincoln's pardons were individual, laborious, granted against a capital penalty and grounded in a stated moral rule.

The modern comparison

Against that, Kiriakou set two claims about the present. The first is volume: "No president has pardoned as many people in American history as Donald Trump has."

The second is timing. Most presidents, he said, "wait until the period between an election and an inauguration", so that "between early November and January 20th, we usually see a flood of pardons." This president, by contrast, "pardons people any time the mood strikes him."

The theory of what a pardon is for

Kiriakou's objection is not to the numbers but to the fit. "Many of these people, some might even say most of these people, just aren't deserving of a pardon," he said, "if you look at why they were convicted of a crime in the first place."

He set out the model he thinks the power is meant to follow: "the whole idea of a pardon is that you've committed a crime, you've admitted to the crime, and then you've put your life on the right track, you've righted the ship." On that test, he said, Rudy Giuliani does not fit the category, "or many of these other people."

He noted separately that a federal pardon leaves state exposure untouched, and that in Giuliani's case a state prison remains a real possibility, whereas nobody in America believed he was ever going to a federal one.

See also

- Donald Trump
- Rudy Giuliani
- Pardons Nobody Asked For
- Kiriakou pardon request
- Kiriakou's Abraham Lincoln collection
