Would Trump self-pardon end Russia investigations?

US President Donald Trump has insisted he has “the complete power to pardon” - fuelling speculation he is considering using the device to extricate himself and members of his team from an investigation into collusion with Russia to interfere in the US election. The President made the statement during an early-morning stream of posts on Twitter, saying: “While all agree the US President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us. FAKE NEWS.” It comes amid mounting pressure on the leader and his administration over their alleged links with the Kremlin’s purported attempts to influence the vote last November in his favour. Just on Saturday, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to rule out the possibility Trump would use his pardon power to shield himself, his family, and his administration from federal lawsuits. The US Constitution does not specifically prohibit presidents from pardoning themselves before they’re formally accused of wrongdoing. So if President Trump, who has not been implicated in wrongdoing, were to decide to grant himself a pass from any prospective prosecution, he would not be violating the letter of the Constitution. But he would be stretching the bounds of presidential power as they’ve never been tested before – and, more importantly, legal experts said, Trump probably would not be able to halt Justice Department and congressional investigations simply by pardoning himself and any allies known to be under scrutiny. In fact, attempting to use pardons to obviate the special counsel investigation could backfire, said Walter Dellinger, who wrote about prospective presidential pardons as a top official in the Clinton Justice Department in 1995. No court in the US has ever had to decide whether a president has the authority to pardon himself because no president has ever done so.The Nixon memoBefore Trump, the only previous president known to have contemplated a pardon for himself was Richard Nixon as he faced possible obstruction of justice charges from the Watergate special prosecutor. Nixon asked his Justice Department (DoJ) whether a self-pardon was legal. Justice lawyers issued a memo opinion in 1974 advising that it was not. The DoJ memo said that under the age-old legal maxim that no one can be the judge of his own case, even the president of the United States cannot pardon himself. The 1974 Justice Department memo is the first, last and only official word on a US president’s power to pardon himself, according to Michigan State law professor Brian Kalt, who has been thinking and writing about presidential self-pardons since he was a Yale Law student in the 1990s. The issue has simply never come before a US court, even tangentially. Article II of the Constitution authorises the president to “grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”Unbearable pressureThe pardons clause explicitly says that presidents cannot grant pardons from “cases of impeachment.” That clause, said former Clinton Justice official Dellinger, could give special counsel Mueller a mandate to continue investigating the Trump campaign even if the president were legally entitled prospectively to pardon himself and everyone else under Mueller’s scrutiny for possible violations of federal criminal laws. Dellinger drew an analogy to Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who did not charge President Bill Clinton with crimes but prepared a report that served as the basis for articles of impeachment against the president. If Trump were to pardon himself prospectively – and particularly if he were to attempt to use that pardon as a rationale to end Mueller’s investigation prematurely – the FBI and Congress could end up investigating whether the president’s motives, and the motives of Justice Department officials who implemented his orders, were proper. Presidential pardons do not carry an implication of guilt. Presidents have exonerated people who steadfastly maintained their innocence even as they accepted the pardon. If President Trump were to pardon himself, he’d be conceding nothing about his criminal liability in the Russia investigation. But given the questionable legality of the maneuver and the likelihood that probes would continue and even intensify, it’s hard to see what a self-pardon would accomplish for the president.