In his final weeks in office, President Donald Trump is outraging the media and many critics with deluges of dubious pardons. Last Tuesday was “No Corrupt Congressman or Iraqi Child Killer Left Behind Day.” On Wednesday, he pardoned his 2016 campaign chief, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner’s father (convicted of tax fraud), and dozens of others. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) responded by calling to strip the pardon power from the Constitution: “Once one party allows the pardon power to become a tool of criminal enterprise, its danger to democracy outweighs its utility as an instrument of justice.”
But the potential damage from Trump’s pardons thus far is small potatoes compared to the most damaging pardon in U.S. history issued by one of the Washington establishment’s favorite presidents, Gerald Ford. On September 8, 1974, Ford issued a pardon of former president Richard Nixon that was so sweeping that it practically condemned future generations of Americans to being governed by lawless presidents.
Nixon had resigned the previous month after the House Judiciary Committee had voted to impeach him. The first article of the bill of impeachment focused on Nixon’s involvement in the coverup of the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters by agents of his Committee to Re-Elect the President.
Ford, in his televised speech to the nation on the pardon on September 8, 1974, repeatedly stressed his devotion to the Constitution and to “equal justice for all Americans.” Ford lamented that Nixon might have difficulty to “obtain a fair trial by jury in any jurisdiction” and that he “would be cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society.” In lieu of offering any evidence that Nixon could not get a fair trial, Ford insisted that Nixon’s suffering and fate “deeply troubles every decent and every compassionate person.” Perhaps most bizarrely, Ford declared that, if Nixon were put on trial, “the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.” Perhaps Ford, a career politician, confused placing “free institutions” with “rulers on a pedestal.”