Trump Has Discussed With Advisers Pardons for His
3 Eldest Children and Giuliani
Rudolph W. Giuliani, who is promoting baseless claims
of widespread election fraud, talked about a pardon with President Trump as
recently as last week.
A pardon for Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s
lawyer, is certain to prompt accusations that Mr. Trump has used his power to
obstruct investigations and insulate himself and his allies.
Maggie
HabermanMichael S. Schmidt
By Maggie
Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt
Dec. 1,
2020
President
Trump has discussed with advisers whether to grant pre-emptive pardons to his
children, to his son-in-law and to his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and
talked with Mr. Giuliani about pardoning him as recently as last week,
according to two people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Trump
has told others that he is concerned that a Biden Justice Department might seek
retribution against the president by targeting the oldest three of his five
children — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump — as well as Ms.
Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser.
Donald
Trump Jr. had been under investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special
counsel, for contacts that the younger Mr. Trump had had with Russians offering
damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, but he was
never charged. Mr. Kushner provided false information to federal authorities
about his contacts with foreigners for his security clearance, but was given
one anyway by the president.
The nature
of Mr. Trump’s concern about any potential criminal exposure of Eric Trump or
Ivanka Trump is unclear, although an investigation by the Manhattan district
attorney into the Trump Organization has expanded to include tax write-offs on
millions of dollars in consulting fees by the company, some of which appear to
have gone to Ms. Trump.
Presidential
pardons, however, do not provide protection against state or local crimes.
Mr.
Giuliani’s potential criminal exposure is also unclear, although he was under
investigation as recently as this summer by federal prosecutors in Manhattan
for his business dealings in Ukraine and his role in ousting the American
ambassador there. The plot was at the heart of the impeachment of Mr. Trump.
The
speculation about pardon activity at the White House is churning furiously,
underscoring how much the Trump administration has been dominated by
investigations and criminal prosecutions of people in the president’s orbit.
Mr. Trump himself was singled out by federal prosecutors as “Individual 1” in a
court filing in the case that sent Michael D. Cohen, his former lawyer and
fixer, to prison.
The
discussions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani occurred as the former New York
mayor has become one of the loudest voices pushing baseless claims of
widespread fraud in the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump still proclaims publicly
that he won. Many of Mr. Trump’s longtime aides have refused to do his bidding
to try to overturn an election that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by
nearly seven million votes. But Mr. Giuliani has repeatedly thrust himself into
the spotlight to cast doubt on the results, which has ingratiated him with the
president.
ABC News
reported earlier on Tuesday that Mr. Trump was considering pardoning family
members.
A
spokeswoman for Mr. Trump did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Mr.
Giuliani did not respond to a message seeking comment, but after a version of
this article was published online, he attacked it on Twitter and said it was
false.
Christianné
L. Allen, Mr. Giuliani’s spokeswoman, said Mr. Giuliani “cannot comment on any
discussions that he has with his client.”
And Mr.
Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, said, “He’s not concerned about this
investigation because he didn’t do anything wrong, and that’s been our position
from Day 1.”
The Fox
News host and Trump ally Sean Hannity said on Monday that given the animosity
from Democrats directed at Mr. Trump, the president should consider pardoning
his entire family. “If Biden ever became president, I’d tell Trump pardon
yourself and pardon your family,” Mr. Hannity told his viewers.
Mr. Trump
is an avid consumer of Fox News, particularly Mr. Hannity’s show.
Such a
broad pardon pre-empting any charge or conviction is highly unusual but does
have precedent. In the most famous example, President Gerald R. Ford pardoned
Richard M. Nixon for all of his actions as president. President George
Washington pardoned plotters of the Whiskey Rebellion, shielding them from
treason prosecutions. And President Jimmy Carter pardoned thousands of American
men who illegally avoided the draft for the Vietnam War.
Mr. Trump
has wielded his clemency powers liberally in cases that resonate with him
personally or for people who have a direct line to him through friends or
family, while thousands of other cases await his review.
A pardon
for Mr. Giuliani is certain to prompt accusations that Mr. Trump has used his
pardon power to obstruct investigations and insulate himself and his allies.
Andrew A. Weissmann, a top prosecutor for Mr. Mueller, has said that Mr.
Trump’s dangling of pardons for his allies impeded their work.
In July,
the president commuted the sentence of his longtime adviser Roger J. Stone Jr.,
who had refused to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigators and was
eventually convicted of seven felonies. Last week, Mr. Trump pardoned his
former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who had backed out of his
cooperation agreement with the special counsel’s office for “any and all
possible offenses” beyond the charge he had faced of lying to federal
investigators.
The Flynn
pardon raised expectations that Mr. Trump would bestow clemency on other
associates — like his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who refused to
discuss matters from the 2016 election with prosecutors — in his final weeks in
office.
Mr.
Giuliani has asked Mr. Trump’s campaign to pay him $20,000 a day for his work
on trying to overturn the election, a figure that would make him among the most
highly paid lawyers in the world. The staggering sum has stirred opposition
among Mr. Trump’s aides who worry that Mr. Giuliani has perpetuated the claims
of election fraud in hopes of making as much money as possible.
Mr.
Giuliani has expressed concern that any federal investigations of his conduct
that appear to have been dormant under the Trump administration could be
revived in a Biden administration, according to people who have spoken to him.
Legal
experts say that if Mr. Trump wants to fully protect Mr. Giuliani from
prosecution after he leaves office, the president would most likely have to
detail in the language of the pardon what crimes he believed Mr. Giuliani had
committed.
Federal prosecutors
in Manhattan have since 2019 been investigating the role of Mr. Giuliani and
two other associates in a wide-ranging pressure campaign directed at pushing
the Ukrainian government to investigate Mr. Trump’s rivals, namely Mr. Biden’s
son Hunter Biden.
The two
Giuliani associates — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — were arrested in October
2019 as they prepared to board a flight from Washington to Frankfurt with
one-way tickets. They were charged with violating campaign finance laws as part
of a complex scheme to undermine the former American ambassador in Ukraine,
Marie L. Yovanovitch, who Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump believed should have been
doing more to pressure the Ukrainians.
Prosecutors
in Manhattan continued to investigate Mr. Giuliani’s role in the scheme over
the past year, focusing on whether he was, in pushing to oust Ms. Yovanovitch,
essentially double dipping: working not only for Mr. Trump but also for
Ukrainian officials who wanted the ambassador gone for their own reasons,
according to people briefed on the matter.
It is a
federal crime to try to influence the United States government at the request
or direction of a foreign official without disclosing their involvement. Mr.
Giuliani has said that he did nothing wrong and that he did not register as a
foreign agent because he was acting on behalf of Mr. Trump, not any Ukrainians.
Even as Mr.
Trump maintains that the election was stolen and files lawsuits aimed at
delaying its certification, his White House is preparing for the final stages
of his presidency. The end of any administration typically prompts a wave of
pardons, particularly when a term has been engulfed in controversy like Mr.
Trump’s, in which several people close to him became ensnared in federal
investigations.
“The pardon
power has been used by many presidents in politically self-serving ways,
whether it was George H.W. Bush or Clinton,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a
professor at Harvard Law School, citing how Mr. Bush pardoned six of his
associates — including the former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger — for
their role in the Iran-contra affair.
“Politically,
a pardon of Giuliani would be explosive,” Mr. Goldsmith added, “but pardoning
pals has been done before.”
Under
previous administrations, presidents have largely granted pardons after they
have gone through a formal review process at the Justice Department, where
lawyers examined the convictions, discussed the ramifications of a potential
pardon with prosecutors and then provided the White House with recommendations
on how to proceed. On several occasions, Mr. Trump has gone against the Justice
Department’s recommendations and the advice of his own White House advisers,
granting pardons to political allies and celebrities.
When
presidents have deviated from that process, scandals have occasionally
occurred, especially after pardons in the last days of an administration. On
the final day of Bill Clinton’s presidency, he granted a pardon to Marc Rich, a
wealthy financier and longtime Democratic donor who was considered a fugitive
as he had fled the United States to avoid tax charges.
Prosecutors
in Manhattan investigated whether the pardon had been part of a quid pro quo,
but no one was ever charged. At the time, Mr. Giuliani, who had helped bring
criminal charges against Mr. Rich years earlier as a federal prosecutor, was
deeply critical of the move, calling it “a disgrace” and declaring it “a
midnight pardon.”
No
president has tried to grant someone a pardon for crimes they have not yet
committed — essentially a prospective get-out-of-jail-free card — and legal
experts say it is unlikely to hold any weight. In the case of Donald Trump Jr.,
Mr. Mueller’s investigation examined questions of whether his contacts during
the 2016 election with WikiLeaks and Russians offering dirt on Mrs. Clinton
amounted to campaign finance violations. Donald Trump Jr. was never interviewed
by the special counsel’s office and was never charged.
In the case
of Mr. Kushner, he omitted several significant contacts with foreigners when he
filled out a form for his White House security clearance, including ones with
the Russians offering damaging information on Mrs. Clinton during the campaign.
Under federal law it is a crime to provide inaccurate or incomplete information
on the background check documents for security clearances.
In 2018,
the White House counsel and chief of staff recommended that Mr. Kushner not
receive a Top Secret security clearance because of issues that had been
discovered during his background check. Over the objections of Mr. Trump’s
aides, the president unilaterally granted Mr. Kushner the clearance.
Ben Protess
contributed reporting.
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.
@maggieNYT
Michael S.
Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal
investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one
for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of
President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
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