Any thoughts on the CI aspect of foreign agents/shady influence brokers like Manafort having leverage on a former president of the United States, by virtue of them clamming up about his level of involvement? I’m not sure Trump has the foresight to consider that a broke and free Manafort might be riskier to him than a jailed Manafort.

Manafort won’t get any dispossessed properties back.

He will probably get reimbursed from US Treasury Judgement Fund.

Courts will likely have little interest in duking out against relatively limitless plain Constitutional language “offenses against US.”

For his trouble Manafort likely will have to go through process of transforming his pardon terms into a judgement for DoJ to act on US Treasury Fund repayments. Before Jan. 20, that may not be much trouble at all, though.

I’m not proud of this, but the idea that Trump pardons Manafort, Stone, and/or Flynn but screws the pooch so badly that one or more of them STILL ends up in jail would balance most of the 2020 trainwreck for me.

Thank you for the careful and systematic explanation of these pardons.

Ahem…how’s about a pardon for Meng Wanzhou?
I mean were working on the “Meng” Dynasty, going into the third year of (really nice) house arrest (she has 2 Vancouver mansions, pick one)! Wish the 2 Mikes had the same comfort.

If there coming cheap and fast, why not.

OT: Bmaz, I have an original Vinyl, Leon Russel/Mark Beno from 1972? Lyric in there about thieves in the choir with the long flowing robes.

Long time fan, great work Dr.W and team, I could use some Rayne, been so dry.
All the best in 2021.

“[P]eople say that accepting a pardon is tantamount to accepting guilt, under Burdick v. United States. It’s not. It’s narrower….” Can you elaborate on this? In distinguishing between immunity and pardon (as well as between the acts of offer and acceptance of a pardon), Burdick says that the granting of a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it”. Why would Flynn’s acceptance of Trump’s pardon not qualify as a confession of guilt to whatever scope the pardon extends?

The late Mary, lawyer and emptywheel contributor, had many important things to say about the law during the Bush years. The links to her posts are currently not loading properly. Here is a bit of Mary’s sharp intellect and wit. I copied them from a file I made a while ago:

(note to the mods: I never learned how to do the block quotes. Always relied on the embedded tools on the old site. My apologies):

Mary’s Bybee/Yoo Memo dissection
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/02/27/opr-report-working-thread-four/

“1 – There’s the August 2002 CIA analysis given to the WH indicating that at least 1/2 of the prisoners at GITMO were not, despite Presidential and CIA and DOD representations to the contrary, even combatants of any kind, much less enemy combatants, much less unlawful enemy combatant much less the “worst of the worst” Nothing to indicate that advice to DoD was ever revised in light of this factual finding made available to, at a minimum, CIA, Bellinger, Gonzales, Flanigan and Addington. Very likely Yoo was made aware of this info as well.

2. Yoo and numerous other lawyers sat silent, despite actual knowledge of evidence to the contrary, when the Abu Ghraib soldiers were scapegoated as being a few bad apples and information for their defense as to Presidential and OLC approvals of similar activities being granted to DoD was withheld.

3. No one (Yoo, Addington, Flanigan, Gonzales, Ashcroft, Thompson, Comey, etc. etc.) ever seems to
have put a lit hold on any of the torture evidence and information, in addition to all the disappearing emails in violation of law. Comey and Clement had direct involvement in the Padilla case and allegations in connection with the original material witness warrant about coerced statements from Zubaydah and Binyam Mohamed used in the FBI affidavit tendered to Mukasey (in his role then as judge) and the Moussaoui case was pending and other cases in the pipeline and, as bmaz so often points out, the torture would be relevant evidence in at least the detainees own trials or commissions and yet no lit holds, not even for a detainee with an outstanding indictment.

4. Despite all the focus by Margolis and Mukasey and other on the immediate 9-11 aftermath as an excuse for the memos, note that despite the passage of many years and despite Sup Ct rulings in Rasul and Hamdi and Hamdan etc. the principals still maintain they were correct in their memos and Yoo blatantly continues to call out the Sup Ct as being incorrect where they have dismantled any of his ideology by ruling.

5. All of these lawyers, including Yoo, had continuing duties after the hair on fire days immediately after 911 to supplement and correct.

6. After years of hearing media references to the the CIA intel community referring to the Bybee/Yoo memos as the Golden Shield and as granting immunity, etc. Yoo et al were on reasonable notice that their opinions were being used and relied upon as reliance memos and had a duty to so advise if they were not intended for that purpose. That is one of the primary outs Bybee, Mukasey etc. are taking – that the memos were only intended for use by sophisticated legal users like Rizzo, not for field torturers.

7. The Comey emails are evidence that at least Comey, Rosenberg, Bradbury and Gonzales (and very likely predecessors such as Ashcroft) knew about other techniques that were being used and not disclosed. In addition to those emails and the knowledge they reveal, numerous sources in articles and books ahve made the allegations of things such as the use of threats to KSMs (still disappared) wife and children in his interrogations and forcible anal drugging with mental states altering drugs, stripping detainees and having women take pictures of them stripped, etc. none of which are mentioned in the memos. Once all of this become public, it cannot be that there was no one, throughout all of CIA and DOJ and DOD and OLC, who had a duty to advise CIA that if such things were taking place, they were not authorized.

8. I understand the focus is on Yoo, but how, after the domestic and international reaction to the release of the Abu Ghraib pictures, no one at OLC has ever discussed that reaction in context of the “shock the conscience” US law standard is a mystery. There are not many contemporaneous MSM reports on those pictures that do not use the words “shock” or “shocking” or “shocked.” And Bush explained to Jordan that the US reaction to the things shown in the pictures is that they were humiliations of the prisoners and they made us “sick to our stomachs”

“I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families,” Bush said. “I assured him that Americans like me didn’t appreciate what we saw, that it made us sick to our stomachs”
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20040507/ai_n11455883/

And at the risk of really getting into the weeds, despite all the claims by Mukasey and others that they were just giving “technical” advice and not setting policy, there is the memo from Bybee in advance of Bush’s Padilla EO, where Bybee “recommends” (as opposed to just looking at whether it would be legal) that the DOJ allow the CIC to take a US citizen arrested in the US and currently then in the custody of the District Court in the SD NY and turn that US citizen over to be disappeared by the military (into the kinds of interrogation programs being authorized by OLC).

Not technical legal advice, but an affirmative recommendation.”

Mary’s take on Reliance Memos:

from http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/07/30/richard-ben-veniste-calls-out-obama-for-spiking-the-privacy-board/

“…for legal opinions in general, they need to be based on specific and well defined facts. Those can be presented in the form of a hypothetical, but the advice is then limited to any real circumstance that fits exactly the hypothetical presented. Emphasis on exactly.

There is another requirement for reliance memos. They can only be relied upon by the person to whom they are given. All the OLC memos went to General Counsel and Department heads or their seconds – none were give to and for the benefit of, for example, CIA field agents in general. Also a big problem for reliance memos.

There’s also the issue of whether or not the memos themselves, classifed up the wazoo as they were, got cabled or otherwise provided to the torturers – because they would need to be delivered to as well as addressed to the party seeking reliance if they were reliance opinions. I could go on a bit on that, but see the practical issues. I so wish someone would get into those things with a Yoo or a Mukasey or Gonzales when they mention things like that.

This is something that was not positied in the professional ethics review or worked within its scope, and yet it should have been central. If your opinion was intended so that the “guys and gals” doing the White House’s torture for the White House had some direction and guidance – – – uh, Mr. Yoo, Mr. Ashcroft, etc. how is it that you provided that guidance to them, when you were only issuing opinions to General Counsels? Did you follow up to see how the General Counsels made the information avaialable? Did you expand the scope of your opinions to include field torturers? If your assigment was to give guidance to field torturers, how did you do that? What was your responsiblity and duty and to whom did that responsiblity and duty flow? Was your duty to give a CYA card to a Gen Counsel – or to give a reliance memorandum for a field torturer? How did you fulfill that duty, etc. etc. etc.

They never get nailed on any of that and never will now.

Also, when you give a reliance opinion and discover that your facts have failed, you have a duty to revise that opinion. That was not reviewed in the ethics inquiry either – but that duty to correct is there, nonetheless. Especially when you know your opinion is being pulled up and relied upon in connection with numerous judicial proceedings.

So when you learn, for example, that Zubaydah doesn’t plan operations for Al Qaeda at all, much less as a high value operational target,then what, Mr. Yoo, did you do to correct your prior opinions and advice? When you learned that people were being snatched and subjected to your “not torture IF they are a high value target” advice, what did you do to clarify your advice? When you learned they were being frozen to death at the Salt Pit, what did you do to clarify your advice?

So much worth asking, so little that is ever asked. And how freaking appalling that so many of these guys end up as professors of some sort. It’s so much like the Catholic Church sending its pedophiles hither and thither to wreak their havoc without every having any consequences, it makes you ill.”