Before he left office in 1953, President Harry Truman handed out a number of pardons to politically connected convicts — and, perhaps to avoid blowback, he did so entirely in secret.
In 2001, Bill Clinton waited until the final day of his presidency to issue a pardon he knew would go off like a political bomb: to Marc Rich, the oil trader and fugitive indicted in a sprawling tax evasion case, whose former wife had made donations to the Clinton presidential library and the Democratic Party.
And around Christmas in 2008, President George W. Bush rescinded a pardon he had granted to a Brooklyn developer, Isaac Toussie, after The New York Post reported that Toussie’s father had donated $28,500 to the Republican National Committee and another $2,300 to Senator John McCain.
“This is a good decision,” a Justice Department lawyer told the White House aide who went to retrieve Toussie’s pardon grant before it could be delivered to him, according to my colleague Peter Baker’s book on the Bush presidency, “Days of Fire.” “Because I don’t know if anybody could survive this.”
The power of the pardon is so absolute that the only way to punish a president for how he uses it is to impeach him or to vote him out. Most presidents have wanted to avoid those things. So they’ve granted pardons carefully, even furtively, often saving what might prove scandalous until the very last days of their terms.
“The pardon power for a president is virtually unlimited,” said Alberto Gonzales, who served under Bush as White House counsel and then as the attorney general. “In almost every case at the federal level, the question is not a concern over the authority to grant clemency, but whether clemency is appropriate given history, the circumstances of the offender and the politics.”
