1. Toluse Olorunnipa and Josh Dawsey: Trump wields pardon power as political weapon, rewarding loyalists and undermining prosecutors

Among the dozens of people who received pardons from President Trump this week were several who lied to investigators and obstructed a federal probe into the president's links to Russia.

Some had personal connections to Trump or his most loyal backers. A handful were Republican lawmakers rewarded for fealty to the president after betraying the public trust. Others abused their authority in more violent ways, killing or injuring unarmed civilians.

Taken together, the rogues’ gallery of criminals receiving clemency this week showcased Trump’s willingness to exert raw political power for his own personal gain, handing out favors to friends at a time when he is seeking GOP support for his flailing bid to reverse his election loss.

In a process White House aides describe as ad hoc, many of the pardon seekers ended up on the president’s radar after conservative activists, television commentators or other friends of Trump made personal appeals on their behalf.

The brazenness of the announcements — which included pardons for his daughter’s father-in-law, a former campaign manager and convicted killers from a private security firm founded by a longtime political ally — rocked Washington and sparked calls for an overhaul of the constitutional power.

Trump’s wave of pardons, coming less than a month before he is set to leave office, is his latest exploitation of his executive powers in ways that offend the spirit of the Constitution, if not its letter, said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

“The pardon is an unfettered power, so I don’t think that there was ever a chance that he wasn’t going to look after the people he’s been quietly authorizing and protecting all along,” he said. “Nobody with a straight face can argue that this use of the pardon power is consistent with what the Framers envisioned when they conveyed it in Article II.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-pardon-power-russia-probe-mueller/2020/12/24/c55000c8-45fd-11eb-b0e4-0f182923a025_story.html

2. Susan B.Glasser: The Trümperdämmerung Is a Fitting End to 2020

As the awful year of 2020 and the awful tenure of Donald Trump both come to an end, the President has partied with the unmasked in Palm Beach and taken credit for a vaccine against a virus that he once counseled could be beaten with bleach. He has pardoned mercenary child-killers and Paul Manafort. He has golfed. He has raged. He has vetoed the annual defense bill and threatened to shut down the government over the holidays. He has turned against even some of his most loyal henchmen, and some, in turn, have finally flipped on him. “Mr. President . . . STOP THE INSANITY,” the New York Post blared on Monday, after four years of relentless cheerleading.

But, of course, the President did not, and he will not. He continues to refuse to accept his defeat in the election, and just the other day he retweeted a claim that “treason” kept him from winning. Injecting still more political drama into the most ministerial of constitutional processes, Trump and his most fanatical supporters now want Congress to refuse to confirm Joe Biden’s Electoral College win on January 6th—which is both pointless, in that it will not happen, and incredibly destructive. Meanwhile, more than a hundred thousand Americans have died of the coronavirus just since the election, and only two million Americans—not the hundred million he once promised—have so far received the vaccine.

he Trümperdämmerung is finally here, and it is every bit the raging dumpster fire that we, the unlucky audience for this drama, have come to expect. Is there anyone left who is surprised that the President is careening through the last days of his Administration with a reckless disdain that simply has no precedent in American public life? https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-trumperdammerung-is-a-fitting-end-to-2020

3. Laurence Tribe: Donald Trump’s pardons must not obstruct justice

If, as Alexander Pope reflected in 1711, “to err is human, to forgive, divine,” then the US Constitution’s pardon power — the prerogative of forgiveness — should be beyond reproach.

Instead, a godless US president who appears incapable of forgiveness has seemingly perverted this instrument of mercy into another grave threat to the rule of law. Donald Trump’s recent twisting of the pardon power risks leaving a damaging legacy: a blueprint for manipulating this vestige of royal prerogative to place presidents and their cronies above the law. But a remedy exists: investigation and potential prosecution. We must treat any obstructions of justice we uncover as the crimes they are.

It is critical to distinguish between two types of corrupt pardons. There are those that are merely contemptible for their intrinsic immorality — they may give a free walk to American war criminals (the Blackwater contractors convicted of a massacre), corrupt politicians (former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, convicted of trying to sell a Senate seat), and relatives (Mr Trump’s son-in-law’s criminally convicted father Charles Kushner). There are others that pose structural dangers by placing the president and his circle above the law and thwarting investigations into wrongdoing.

If Mr Trump abuses pardons to shield himself and key allies from justice, that could be charged as criminal obstruction of justice, an abuse of the constitutional power of clemency to accomplish an illegal end.

In a poetic turn of justice, such obstructive pardons would make prosecuting a president who granted them easier. If Messrs Manafort and Stone and former national security adviser Michael Flynn were called to testify against Mr Trump, their pardons would make it much harder for them to invoke their constitutional rights to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination.

If Mr Trump has used his pardon power to commit crimes, he must be prosecuted; failing to do so would set a perilous precedent for future administrations. In future investigations of presidential misconduct, essential witnesses might routinely protect the boss in hopes of (or in exchange for) immunity. Worse yet, future presidents could treat their terms in office as four-year licenes to commit heinous crimes with impunity. As Mason worried in 1788, the president would have “establish[ed] a monarchy, and destroy[ed] the republic.” https://www.ft.com/content/e73fdd69-1fee-4886-b299-959ce9647151

4. Jonathan Chait: Trump Completes Russiagate Cover-up by Pardoning Paul Manafort

“The official White House statement justifying the pardon of Paul Manafort explains that his prosecution “was premised on the Russian collusion hoax.” But Trump’s pardon — a ploy so well signaled its inevitability was clear even before he stepped into the Oval Office and that he has floated for years to keep Manafort quiet — is the final proof the Russia investigation was not a hoax but a scandal Trump used his powers to thwart.

Trump has already pardoned Michael Flynn and commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, both of whom lied to investigators to protect him.

The Manafort pardon is the final piece of his Russiagate cover-up. Before Trump hired him as campaign manager in 2016, Manafort spent the bulk of the decade managing the campaign of corrupt, pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort was being paid for this job by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and Manafort — who had grown accustomed to a lavish lifestyle — apparently fell into such debt to Deripaska that he disappeared before resurfacing as Trump’s campaign chairman, a job he oddly accepted at no pay in spite of his severe financial distress.  https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/pardon-paul-manafort-trump-russia-cover-up-collusion-mueller.html

5. Greg Sargent: Republicans raging at Trump are getting exactly what they deserve

House Republicans are in a fury with President Trump, now that he is threatening to blow up the carefully negotiated settlement that led to passage of the $900 billion economic rescue package. They are raging that he abandoned them after the White House asked them to support the deal.

Oh, dear. Given what a cartoonish farce this has all become, let’s let Mr. Krabs of SpongeBob SquarePants do the honors:

“Boo, hoo. Let me play a sad song for you on the world’s smallest violin.”

The corrupt GOP bargain with Trump has long been as follows. Republicans would politely ignore his corruption (among many other hideous degradations) or even actively shield him from accountability wherever possible. In exchange, they would get conservative judges and Trump’s active support as they pursued tax cuts for the rich and other deeply regressive obsessions like the failed rollback of the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans scored heavily on all these fronts, and in return they delivered beyond what should have been Trump’s wildest dreams. And this went well beyond their backing for Trump’s effort to overturn the election. During impeachment, House Republicans went to extraordinary, farcical lengths to function as dutiful propagandists and literal bodyguards against accountability for Trump. They worked to thwart transparency into Trump’s finances, helping to shield his self-dealing from the public they purport to serve.

But not only was all this still not good enough for Trump, he’s now also further punishing them in a way that exposes a politically damaging core truth about that very bargain. Congressional Republicans, motivated by orthodox conservative opposition to spending, are the real obstacle to robust assistance to the American people, amid two of the biggest crises our nation has faced in decades.

That, after all this, House Republicans feel abandoned and betrayed by Trump — well, it couldn’t be happening to a bunch of nicer sycophants, enablers and betrayers of our democracy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/24/house-republicans-trump-covid-relief/

6. Texas Fracking Billionaires Drew Covid-19 Aid While Investing in Rivals

But the industry was already under pressure from international competition and a sagging oil price by the time the pandemic hit, and its mounting woes prompted the Wilkses and others to turn to allies in Washington, including Mr. Cruz. The Republican senator helped convince the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve to change the rules for pandemic loans to ensure oil and gas firms could participate.

Soon after the U.S. government changed the rules of its lending program in April, a Wilks family company, ProFrac Holdings LLC, applied for and received a $35 million loan, federal records show. ProFrac, a supplier of pumping equipment and services, is just one slice of the sprawling portfolio of fracking businesses that the Wilks family owns in part or outright across the American West and Canada.

The Wilks brothers are longtime financial backers of Mr. Cruz. The brothers donated $15 million to a super PAC called Keeping the Promise that championed Mr. Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, making them the largest financial backers of his political career.

Mr. Cruz “worked to ensure small and medium-sized businesses directly harmed by the economic impacts of this pandemic had access to emergency liquidity,” said Lauren Blair Aronson, a spokeswoman for the senator. “The result of his leadership was a program that has helped about 25 U.S. energy producers, including roughly a dozen in Texas, and helped protect over 300,000 oil and gas jobs in Texas.”

BailoutWatch, a nonprofit group that tracks pandemic aid to industry, said Mr. Cruz’s efforts to get relief for the oil-and-gas industry amount to a reward for a campaign contributor.

“ProFrac’s loan is blatant misappropriation of taxpayer dollars,” said Chris Kuveke, an analyst for the organization, which has received funding from Climate Nexus, a group that advocates for clean energy. He said Mr. Cruz’s biggest political benefactors ended up receiving one of the relief program’s largest loans to the fossil-fuel industry. “It’s hard not to connect the dots.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-fracking-billionaires-drew-covid-19-aid-while-investing-in-rivals-11609070400?mod=djemalertNEWS

7. Robert Reich: Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy

Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.

The message? A president can obstruct special counsels’ investigations of his wrongdoing, push foreign officials to dig up dirt on political rivals, fire inspectors general who find corruption, order the entire executive branch to refuse congressional subpoenas, flood the Internet with fake information about his opponents, refuse to release his tax returns, accuse the press of being “fake media” and “enemies of the people”, and make money off his presidency.

And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his reelection.

A president can also lie about the results of an election without a shred of evidence – and yet, according to polls, be believed by the vast majority of those who voted for him. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/26/americans-acceptance-of-trumps-behavior-will-be-his-vilest-legacy

8. Sam Stein and Asawin Suebsaeng: In His Final Month in Office, Trump Works Overtime to Drag the GOP Down With Him

Donald Trump has spent his final weeks in office much as he has the preceding years: setting fire to the relationships that buttressed his rise to power.

Over the past few days, the president has floated primaries against top-ranking Republicans, pushed out administration officials who were bedrock allies, threatened major bills crafted in conjunction with his team, and turned on officials who won’t help him cling to power. Inside the White House, the response to it all has been growing alarm, coupled with resignation that this is the 45th U.S. president’s modus operandi. Trump’s profound self-interest is no secret. But never has that trait been so visible against a backdrop this consequential, with his legal team and administration’s attack on democratic processes so blatantly anti-democratic.

“The president spent much of the Christmas weekend [at Mar-a-Lago] talking about other Republicans who weren’t doing what he wanted and acting like failures and defeatists,” said one person present at his private Florida club who was on the receiving end of his grievances. Even behind closed doors, the source said, “he was not finding much to be happy about this Christmas.”

But Trump’s actions raise questions about his future as well. And they have illuminated—once more—the fundamental paradox behind his political rise: How can someone burn so many bridges and not eventually find himself alone?

“He is no longer the celebrity mogul magnate as he was in New York, and now he is part of… that exclusive Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush [one term president] club,” said Sam Nunberg, a Trump supporter and former political adviser. “He has gone from handling this in a manner that would have helped him keep this power base that he had to now going through conspiracy theories and giving over the portfolio to two bumbling morons in Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell… You don’t want to go out like this with him. It’s not like you’re in a bunker at the end of WWII. You’re in Crazy Town.

That Trump would disregard his party and turn on top aides in a time of duress surely couldn’t have been a surprise to those on the short end of the exchange. Few, if any, relationships with Trump end in a place better than where they started. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-works-overtime-to-drag-the-gop-down-with-him

9. Fintan O’Toole: Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands

This is Trump’s legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.

In this end is his new beginning. Stripped of direct power, he will face enormous legal and financial jeopardy. He will have every reason to keep drawing on his greatest asset: his ability to unleash the demons that have always haunted the American experiment – racism, nativism, fear of “the government”.

Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands. It is, for him, not goodbye but hasta la vista. Instead of waving him off, those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his heart. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-trump-has-unfinished-business-a-republic-he-wants-to-destroy-still-stands-1.4435655

10. From Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2020

Long term, the economic outlook remains troubling, with the U.S. economy being kept afloat mainly by consumers making monthly payments to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, CBS All Access, HBO Now, Peacock, HBO Max, Discovery Plus, Starz, Chickadee, Eyeballz, Amazon Super Deluxe, HBO Medium Rare, Chickadee Plus, Disney Extra Special, Amazon Supreme Unleaded, HBO Gluten Free and a bewildering array of other streaming services that consumers rarely watch but keep paying for because they can’t figure out how to cancel their subscriptions.

“These people are pumping millions of dollars a month into the economy,” states Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. “God help us if they ever remember their passwords.”

In other national news, President Trump, faced with soaring coronavirus cases and a congressional stalemate over a desperately needed relief package, devotes his energies, as chief executive, to tweeting approximately once per hour that the election was RIGGED. The Trump legal team, alleging that there was a massive organized conspiracy to commit vote fraud, files multiple lawsuits but achieves basically the same legal outcome as Hamilton Burger, the stupendously ineffective district attorney on the “Perry Mason” TV show, who went to court week after week for many seasons and almost never won a case, WHICH ONLY PROVES HOW MASSIVE AND ORGANIZED THIS CONSPIRACY IS.

While the president continues to insist that he was reelected, members of his staff quietly prepare for the transition by updating their résumés and conducting a search for the briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes, believed last seen in the back of a golf cart in Bedminster, N.J.

But this is no normal year, and we’re nervous. We worry that something major, by which we mean bad, will happen after our deadline — something involving the presidential election, or the virus, or some awful thing we cannot even imagine. Like, for example, maybe astronomers will announce that because of the human race snacking at historically high levels during the pandemic lockdown, the Earth has gained a huge amount of mass, which has slowed the planet down in its orbit around the sun and, as a result, to make the calendar work out, we have to add an ENTIRE MONTH to 2020. This month would of course be called ...PANDEMBER... which you probably think can’t possibly happen, right? What a crazy idea!

As crazy as masked Americans fighting over toilet paper.

Our point is, we don’t know what else will happen this year, including when it will end. We’re just hoping that it eventually does, and that next year is nothing like it. In that spirit, we’ll close with the wish we always offer at the end of our annual review, although this time it’s more of a prayer:

Happy new year. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/12/27/dave-barrys-year-review-2020/