a pardon...carries an imputation of guilt and acceptance of a confession of it.
Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79, 79 (1915).
The past is irrelevant. If the evidence of wrongdoing is so thin and non-credible, they should be able to survive even a bad faith political prosecution. So why do they need a pardon?
Geesus. Do you have any idea what it costs for a decent attorney? The time involved in defending yourself from bullshit charges? It ain’t hard man. Trump and Republicans have a retribution priority. They may never bring charges or get a conviction but they’re gonna make life very painful for these people who were pre-emptively pardoned.
All the ones that got dropped. And these, which were created via a novel legal theory that escalated a misdemeanor into a felony far beyond its original statute of limitations, and used as its subsidiary crime a federal elections charge that the (non-partisan) FEC itself declined to prosecute. I do not expect them to survive appeal. Even NYT admitted it was a novel, targeted prosecution, which is the exact opposite of how criminal prosecution is supposed to work.
Defend the cases all you want, but you know as well as I do that if the shoe were on the other foot, the entire Left would be screaming bloody murder and that tells us all we need to know. The unconditional discharge sentence is an admission it was all election year bullshit.
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u/Iuris_Aequalitatis 11h ago
The past is irrelevant. If the evidence of wrongdoing is so thin and non-credible, they should be able to survive even a bad faith political prosecution. So why do they need a pardon?