slate "The Arpaio Pardon Is a Bad Sign for the Mueller Investigation"
Trump has always wanted to stifle judicial oversight. Now he’s shown he will.
By Mark Joseph Stern
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/08/trump_s_arpaio_pardon_is_a_bad_sign_for_mueller_s_investigation.html
When President Donald Trump pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Friday, he tweeted that the sheriff was an “American patriot” who “kept Arizona safe!” His pardon was, in one sense, narrow: Arpaio was not convicted for his relentless and well-documented brutality, but for criminal contempt after he violated a court order demanding that he stop illegally detaining Latinos. In another sense, however, Trump’s pardon—which was accompanied by a White House statement praising Arpaio and eliding his misdeeds—broadly condones the sheriff’s relentless criminality. It sends a message to Latinos that they do not deserve equal rights, and affirms to the judiciary that Trump has no respect for the rule of law.
But Trump’s pardon of the sheriff is also troubling for its timing. The political nature of the pardon is obvious—it vividly demonstrates Trump’s willingness to abuse his presidential powers in order to let his friends and supporters off the hook. But just as notable is that it came right on the heels of the president’s Phoenix rally, as the president is being pressured to disavow the most racist elements of his base. What’s even worse is the fact that the pardon arrived without review, and before Arpaio was even sentenced for defying the courts. As my colleague Dahlia Lithwick has written, Arpaio’s conviction was a test for how long and how willing Trump will be to abide judicial oversight. He flunked it. It now seems clear that many future beneficiaries of the president’s clemency will be his political allies—and that he might not wait to for them to be convicted or sentenced before issuing a pardon. Trump, in other words, may use his pardon power to stymie Robert Mueller’s investigation, as well as other inquiries into the past misdeeds of his associates.
The commonalities between Arpaio and Trump are striking. Both men disdain the rule of law, and Arpaio’s unrestrained racial profiling and harassment of perceived enemies—he arrested journalists who wrote about him critically—all sound like true expressions of Trump’s own deep desires. Trump and Arpaio were first drawn to each other over their belief that President Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate was forged. (Somehow, Arpaio found the money to send an investigator to Hawaii, who concluded, falsely, that the certificate was fraudulent.) Their bond deepened during the campaign: Arpaio endorsed Trump early, then stumped for him and appeared at campaign events where the two men lauded each other for their hatred of undocumented immigrants. In 2016, Glenn Thrush called Arpaio “Trump’s political godfather” and described the sheriff’s profound affection for Trump. The two shared startlingly similar bigotries, biases, and strongman instincts.
It’s no surprise, then, that Trump wished to pardon Arpaio. But it is genuinely shocking that the president followed through, and did so in this manner. There has long been a careful procedure in place for the pardon process: Individuals submit a request for clemency, and the Justice Department recommends good candidates based on pre-approved guidelines. Trump didn’t bother even to pretend to use this system to pardon Arpaio. The sheriff hadn’t formally requested one, the usual first step in the process. And he hadn’t yet been sentenced. Typically, an individual’s sentence plays a key role in the president’s clemency decision; President Barack Obama, for example, commuted the sentences of many prisoners who, he felt, had served enough time. Trump didn’t need to wait for a sentence.
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