CNN One Thing

This is One Thing, I'm David Reind, and what happens when a president starts handing out get out of jail free cards to his friends?

The question with the constitution and the pardon power is where are the tickets for speeding through it? Is anyone gonna issue the ticket for speeding? And I think Donald Trump knows no one will. Stick with us.

All right, we do have breaking news in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

In case you missed it, the Jeffrey Epstein drama is back in full force in Washington.

These are emails that show Jeffrey Epstein mentioning Donald Trump by name multiple times and private correspondence that he had with people including Ghislaine Maxwell, obviously his longtime associate and accomplice, and also

'These emails have sparked new questions about what President Trump knew and when, although we should say he has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and has always denied involvement in the notorious convicted sex offenders crimes. But the emails also appear to undercut what Ghislaine Maxwell told a Justice Department official over the summer that she never saw Trump at Epstein's house and downplayed their relationship. Now, Maxwell has well-established credibility problems. But she has since been moved to a lower-security prison camp, not the usual home for convicted sex offenders. So all of that has led some to ask the White House.

If the president is considering a pardon for Glenn Maxwell.

Again, he's answered this repeatedly, it's not something he's talking about or even thinking about at this moment in time, I can assure you of that.

But that's not an unreasonable question. If you just look at the pardon spree Trump has been on lately.

'In a second term so far marked by controversial pardons, today we learn that President Trump granted one to a man whose company helped enrich the Trump family to the tune of billions. The pardon was for this man, Shengping Zhao, the convicted co-founder of the crypto exchange Binance.

Breaking this morning, they were accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in President Trump's favor, and now he is rewarding them. Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mark Meadows among the Trump allies receiving pardons overnight.

Between his two terms, Trump has now pardoned more than 1,650 people who played significant roles in matters involving him personally, including over 1,000 people charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This all has some ethics experts asking, is this creating a permission structure for bad behavior? Help Trump and he'll help you down the line? And what happens to the scores of other people who aren't Trump allies? Do they have a fair shot at redemption? Let's dig into this with Kim Whaley. She's a former assistant U.S. Attorney and a current law professor at the University of Baltimore. She's also the author of the book, Pardon Power, How the Pardon System Works and Why. So Kim, how has the pardon process traditionally worked? Because I do feel like a lot of people just assume that the president can kind of pick whoever they want.

Well, in the old days, you know, even at the turn of the 20th century, it was actually the president who read all the pardons. There was a much smaller criminal justice system, a smaller federal court system, fewer federal crimes. And at one point, I think even the Secretary of State made the recommendations. But for many years now, inside the Department justice, there's a handful of attorneys in the office of the pardon attorney. That review applications. The application is online. There are criteria that they sort through and apply, including whether the applicant has finished their sentence and five years have passed. That's one of the criteria. But because the pardon power is expressed in the constitution under Article II, those are all just recommendations. There's no way for... The pardon attorney's decision to bind the president. So traditionally presidents have gone through that process, but they've been known to bypass it as well.

So it's basically just a suggestion. It's not a must. So then what are we seeing under President Trump here in his second term? How has it looked different to you than it has in the past?

Well, primarily, it's that the historical justifications for a pardon, why there's even a pardon power, seem to have been put by the wayside. The pardon power goes back to the New Testament, right? It's in the Code of Hammurabi. The idea is that certain people just fall through the cracks of the criminal justice system, and there needs to be sort of a sober judge with authority, so to speak. To undo injustices. So that's the theory is mercy. The other rationale, traditional rationale, is the president has issued broad pardons, like George Washington did for the whiskey rebellion. People participated in that to move the country forward after a time of crisis and to just let the country heal. Donald Trump appears to be using the pardon power in a way that... Aggrandizes himself, that actually benefits himself.

Trump filling the stockings of several convicted felons that he's personally connected to with pardons. Among more than 25 pardoms, a group Republican Senator Ben Sasse calls rotten to the core. It started in his first term.

Pardoning people that had been caught up in the Mueller investigation.

The president continues his revenge against the Russia investigation, rewarding two former advisors indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, issuing these full pardons to his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who was convicted for a slew of financial crimes under Roger Stone after commuting his sentence earlier this

So this is January 6th, these are the hostages.

And recently, of course, his very first day of office, pardoning 1,500 people that either pled guilty or convicted in connection with the January 6th insurrection, including hundreds that were convicted of violent crimes.

We hope they come out tonight, frankly. They're expecting it.

'And since then, you know, pardoning people who either donated to his campaign, there was one man whose mother, a couple of weeks before, had paid a million dollars for a fundraising event at Mar-a-Lago, pardoning someone that had widespread convictions in connection with crypto. His business was tied to some of the Trump interests.

The founder of Binance. He has an involvement in your own family's crypto.

The reason why, yes, the, I believe we're talking about the same person, because I do partner with a lot of people, I don't know, he was recommended by a lot people, a lot of people say that. And that's...

Certainly is not what the theory behind the pardon power is from the dawn of time.

We have seen presidents kind of stretch the limits of this power before, right? I remember President Joe Biden pardoning his son, Hunter, in the final days of his term, after insisting for months that he wouldn't do that. And there was outrage when Bill Clinton, on his last day in office, pardoned the fugitive trader Mark Rich, whose first wife donated to Clinton and the Democratic Party. Clinton denied that was the reason for the pardon, but that one just seems especially quaint now, even though it did get a lot of outrage at the time. So has there just been an adjustment of the outrage meter when it comes to these things?

Well, I mean, the Clinton pardon, of course, was when he was outgoing. So, but there was an investigation of that pardon, the Mark Rich pardon, pardon, both by the Southern District of New York, as well as by the United States Congress, you know, no action was taken. But there was a sense that, listen, there's accountability for problematic pardons, and I believe Bill Clinton even wrote years later that, that it was a mistake on the Biden pardon. You know, I was out pretty publicly at the time. Arguing for why the Hunter Biden pardon was not the kind of corrupt pardon that we saw in the first Trump administration that we're seeing and that we are seeing now in part because Donald Trump had promised on the campaign trail to use, if he was reelected, the Department of Justice for retribution, and we've seen that.

So in your eyes that kind of a pardon where you're kind of like preemptively getting ahead of a threat that something might be coming is an acceptable use of this power? I think the Supreme Court

in Trump versus U.S.

We are following a blockbuster decision by the Supreme Court. Today, the justices ruled that Donald Trump is entitled to some level of immunity from criminal prosecution for the actions that he took in the final days of his presidency.

In connection with the January 6th case against Donald Trump.

Justice Sotomayor writing a scathing dissent on behalf of the court's three liberal justices saying quote under the majority's Reasoning he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution Orders the Navy's SEAL team six to assassinate a political rival immune Organizes a military coup to hold on to power immune takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon immune immune immune

and in that opinion indicated the pardon power was a core power. So Donald Trump knew going into a second term like any future president will that criminal pardons are above the law.

To that point, what does it tell you that Trump isn't waiting until his final days in office to issue some of these pardons for folks who are connected to him in any sort of way? Like don't most presidents save the most controversial ones to the end?

Yeah, that's, as I indicated, the idea is, well, there's gonna be pushback, there might be push back from my party.

Yeah, and I don't think you're going to see any, you know, Republicans in Congress kind of sound the alarm about, for example, why Trump would part in as head of this crypto exchange in which his family does a lot of business.

'There's an emoluments clause in the United States Constitution. There's two of them, actually, that ban presidents from getting goodies personally, either domestically or internationally, and yeah, that's supposed to be enforced by the United States Congress. And so people don't understand about the Constitution is that it's not self-executing. It doesn't just enforce itself. It's like a speed limit when you're driving down the street, if it's 35 and you You'll keep going 50 until one day, they install a speed camera and you get a ticket in the mail and then you slow down. So the question with the constitution and the pardon power is where are the tickets for speeding through it? Is anyone gonna issue the ticket for speeding? And I think Donald Trump knows no one will and that's what's happened to the constitution writ large and I think the pardon in power is just a very salient example of that where it's just under our noses and we're just, I think, A, overwhelmed and B. There's just a bit of a collective shrug, like what do we do now?

'We gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, Trump's pardoned attorney and his no-maga left-behind mission. Stick around. Kim, I want to talk about the current U.S. Pardon attorney. It's a guy named Ed Martin. He actually holds four different titles within the Department of Justice, including the head of this new weaponization working group. And reporting by my CNN colleagues last month outlined how he's worked behind the scenes to influence prosecutions of Trump's political enemies like Letitia James and James Comey, even as some career prosecutor sort of questioned whether those cases should have even been brought at all. We just say the Department of Justice and Martin did not comment for that story. But with Martin here, you have him on the prosecution side of things. And at the same time, he's also in charge of reviewing pardons. Have we ever seen an arrangement like that before?

'Well, we've certainly never seen an arrangement where the Justice Department has been co-opted as an arm of retribution and revenge and follows in lockstep with the orders of a single person, right? The closest we've gotten to that is Richard Nixon and Watergate. And after Watergate, there was a lot of laws that were passed to ensure some measure of guard whales around vindictive prosecutions, as well as just a kind of a handshake agreement that the Justice Department operated independently and brought cases based on law and facts. Here we're seeing cases based on who the person is. And then you kind of decide after the fact if there are any laws and facts, but I think under the hands of someone like Ed Martin, we're seen the blurring of those lines as well. This almost this idea that Donald Trump is the law. And I think the danger here is if you cross him, you're going to pay because you and I don't have the authority to arrest somebody that would be a kidnapping. But if somebody with governmental authority does it, it's presumptively legal until you disprove it. And now so much of the power is lodged in one place. So yeah, that's a disturbing conflict of interest in Ed Martin. You know, didn't make it through a confirmation hearing for U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. Because he's so problematic.

We should say the previous pardoned attorney, Liz Oyer, told CNN that she was fired after refusing to restore Mel Gibson's gun rights, who is a Trump supporter himself.

And the request was made and I responded that I was unable to fulfill the request because I did not have enough information about Mr. Gibson to be able to recommend that given his history of domestic violence, he should receive his gun rights back.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch, who signed her termination notice, disputes that story. He says that's not the reason she was fired, but regardless, you know, she is out.

It's terrifying that the number two official in the Department of Justice believes that my ethical duty is to keep silent about what is going on inside the Department of Justice.

You said this was basically conceived as the idea of mercy. So I'm wondering about folks who aren't Trump allies or connected to his orbit, who feel like they've rehabilitated themselves, paid their due to society, have a pending clemency case or thinking about working on one. With all this in mind and knowing that it's basically just a suggestion when it comes from the pardon office, do they have any chance in hell of getting that clemeny?

'Well, even before this administration, there's not really an enforceable or enforced, I should say, ban on lobbying for pardons, whereas the pardon there is, in theory, to show mercy. So the people that are disenfranchised, maybe people that have long sentences for low-level crimes, or we have a racial injustice problem, and we have lot of people that are incarcerated that could contribute to society that don't have millions of dollars, that can't afford an expensive lobbyist or a high profile lawyer. That has access to the White House, that's now been wiped out. And I think Jared Kushner in the first administration, Donald Trump's son-in-law was reportedly the person that was filtering pardon. So now, yeah, the more rich in power for you are, the more likely you're gonna get, quote, mercy, unquote. And it doesn't seem like this president is paying attention to the other factors that traditionally go into play through the pardon attorney for eligibility for a pardon, including. That you've served your sentence five years have passed and that you're showing some measure of remorse.

Yeah, and his first term, Trump did sign this bipartisan bill, the First Step Act, that would, you know, take some steps to reduce some of those inequities that you kind of mentioned, a sort of structural clemency. But when you see some of these people who have such direct connection to the president or his family or his campaign, and you start to get into some of the ethical questions that we've talked about. Well, Kim, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Appreciate your having me on, David.

We should say we reached out to the White House for comment on these pardons. They pointed us to comments made by Press Secretary Caroline Levitt earlier this month, where she insisted that all of the pardoms issued by President Trump have been done by the book.

That's why we have a very thorough review process here that moves with the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel's Office. There's a whole team of qualified lawyers who look at every single part in request that ultimately make their way up to the President of the United States. He's the ultimate final decision maker.

That's it for us today. If you liked the show, make sure you leave us a rating and a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show. We'll be back here on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.