Andrew Weissmann in 2003.
Photo:
Jeff Mitchell / Reuters
President Trump’s flurry of grace and grace this week has been widely denounced, and many of them appear to be undeserved, or worse. But the critics would have more credibility to try to understand why tens of millions of Americans will dismiss them as the Andrew Weissmann pardons.
Mr. Weissmann is the former deputy of Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia collusion inquiry. He is a Democratic partisan who can be seen even now on MSNBC, suggesting that Mr. Trump obstructed justice in the investigation that never yielded evidence of collusion. He and his fellow prosecutors spent two years trying with the full resources of the federal government to prove a case that did not exist.
Instead, they have charged individuals in Trump’s orbit for crimes unrelated to their primary cause. They chased Paul Manafort on the basis of a foreign lobbying statute that is rarely enforced, then came up with evidence of tax fraud. They forced George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan to make pleas based on a single count of making false statements. Roger Stone was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation.
Sir, Manafort’s tax offenses are serious crimes, and that’s how a jury saw them. He and Mr. Stone, former business associates, have long been political villains of the type Mr. Trump likes to be around. But there is no question that they were targeted not in their specific crimes, but because they had ties to Mr. Trump. Prosecutors were out to get hold of Mr. Trump – many of them still are – and they were happy to take others down in the hope that they would have evidence against the president.
Still, the targeted men had nothing to offer except what prosecutors came to get from other sources. Inevitably, Mr. Trump would pardon these former associates before he left office. If the good and righteous are to avoid political pardon, they must be more critical of political persecution.
These points do not apply to the pardon for former GOP congressmen Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins. Both men admitted to violating the public’s trust and deserved at most the commutation of their sentences, not to drop their conviction.
The pardon of four Blackwater guards convicted of killing civilians in Iraq is also difficult to justify. It reminds us of Mr Trump’s earlier intervention to save the Trident Pin for Navy Seal team chief Eddie Gallagher, whose colleagues refused to defend his behavior. These decisions show disrespect for American soldiers who must be disciplined on the battlefield under great pressure.
However, the grace that seems to wield most of Washington’s political class is that related to the Mueller-Weissmann probe. And with them they might consider their own complicity. The Russian collusion saga has damaged American confidence in government agencies far more than its initiators acknowledge. Their refusal to admit the damage, and their own role in it, feeds the cynicism that Mr. Trump is more than happy to exploit.
Potomac Watch: With the release of Rod Rosenstein’s ‘scope’ memo and the retraction of the case against Michael Flynn by the Justice Department, attention turns to Robert Mueller. Image: Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
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Appeared in the print edition of December 26, 2020.