Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers and a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 14h 45m 59s of daytime. The moon is new today. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1945, (Henri) Philippe Pétain goes on trial for treason for his role as leader of Vichy France. He was convicted on all counts, and lived his final years imprisoned on the Île d’Yeu, where “his memory lapses were worsening and he was beginning to suffer from incontinence, sometimes soiling himself in front of visitors and sometimes no longer recognising his wife.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Sean Illing writes President Trump is considering pardoning himself. I asked 15 experts if that’s legal:
President Trump’s lawyers are exploring the potential uses of presidential pardons — including whether the president can pardon himself — as part of an effort to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, according to a new Washington Post report.
I reached out to 15 legal experts and asked them if the president has the constitutional authority to pardon himself. As it turns out, this is something of a legal gray area. The overwhelming consensus was that Trump could make a plausible legal argument that his pardoning powers extend to himself, mostly because the Constitution isn’t clear about this — and, frankly, because this is just not a situation the framers expected.
All the experts agreed about one other fact: Even if Trump does pardon himself, that would not shield him from impeachment hearings. And most believe if he did make a move like this, it would be both an admission of guilt and a potential constitutional crisis [experts’ replies follow]….
Laurence H. Tribe, Richard Painter and Norman Eisen contend that No, Trump can’t pardon himself. The Constitution tells us so:
Can a president pardon himself? Four days before Richard Nixon resigned, his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opined no, citing “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” We agree.
The Justice Department was right that guidance could be found in the enduring principles that no one can be both the judge and the defendant in the same matter, and that no one is above the law.
The Constitution specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and removal. It adds that any official removed through impeachment remains fully subject to criminal prosecution. That provision would make no sense if the president could pardon himself.
Jane Chong writes To Impeach a President: Applying the Authoritative Guide from Charles Black:
The most important book ever written on presidential impeachment is only 69 pages long. Charles Black, Jr.,’s Impeachment: A Handbook was published in the summer of 1974, at the height of the Watergate crisis, and reissued in October 1998, two months before Bill Clinton became the second president in U.S. history to be impeached.
If the pattern holds, the book could enjoy a third printing under the Trump presidency. But I wouldn’t want to prematurely speculate on the point. Black too persuasively urges against it….
Today marks the first time the core chapter of Black’s book—on what he called the “heart of the matter”—is available in its entirety online. We are providing this resource because amidst a tidal wave of 140-character screeds, Black’s analysis of what actually constitutes “the impeachable offense” is pure signal in the noise.
David A. Graham describes The Inadvisable President:
This demonstrates another reason why Trump is an impossible boss: He expects absolute personal loyalty from his aides, but aides cannot expect that the president will return the favor. Perhaps no humiliation is as great as Sessions—the long-time backer thrown to the wolves in an interview with the press—but Trump has repeatedly undercut other top aides.
For example, Trump has repeatedly made public statements at odds with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s effort to broker a resolution between Qatar and several other Gulf States.
When Trump fired Comey, the administration initially claimed that he had been fired for his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Comey’s approach had been widely criticized as improperly harsh, but Trump had said it was unduly easy, making the excuse nonsensical. Nonetheless, Vice President Pence went out and publicly insisted that Comey was fired because the Justice Department had recommended it in light of the Clinton case. The following day, Trump told Holt that actually he’d decided to fire Comey on his own, because of the Russia case.
Diver Craig Capehart recorded as a 40 Ton Humpback Whale Leaps Entirely Out of the Water: