Perhaps my reader has heard of the latest sleazy episode of the Trump Presidency:
A onetime top adviser to the Trump campaign was paid $50,000 to help seek a pardon for John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer convicted of illegally disclosing classified information, and agreed to a $50,000 bonus if the president granted it, according to a copy of an agreement.
And Mr. Kiriakou was separately told that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani could help him secure a pardon for $2 million. Mr. Kiriakou rejected the offer, but an associate, fearing that Mr. Giuliani was illegally selling pardons, alerted the F.B.I. Mr. Giuliani challenged this characterization. [The New York Times]
Trump has already been known to use the pardon power to save political allies from the clutches of Justice, but this is different. This is the confusion that results from mixing two sectors of society – Private and Public – in which the currency of the private sector, which is money and debt, is substituted for the currency of the public sector, which is honor and public obligation.
In other words, the pardon power should be used to correct injustices and to reward exemplary behavior by federal felons; it’s not a party favor to be sold by a President and his aides & allies in order to satisfy pecuniary lusts. But that latter is not really a strong enough statement. By using the pardon power as a party favor, potentially dangerous felons may be loosed, once again, upon the public, because the ability to pay for a pardon does not correlate with the injustice, if any, suffered by the felon; and, further, the mitigating and salutary powers of punishment are thereby reduced.
The President is thus inviting more such abuses. All in the name of, well, money. The moral degradation of the Republic is on public display.
