I had a look around and didn’t see anyone writing about this. I read it on Mother Jones and believe we need to watch the outcome on this one.
It could tie in to Muller’s investigation as far as pardons go.
Pema Levy wrote the article.
Link to the article:
www.motherjones.com/…
“After his pardon, Arpaio asked the court to vacate the contempt judgement against him. The district court halted its proceedings against Arpaio but refused to clear his record. So Arpaio appealed. In the coming months, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will have an opportunity to review the case and potentially overturn a presidential pardon for the first time in more than a century.”
Here is where it gets quite interesting and it relates to our constitutional rights.
“The Trump presidency is already testing the outer bounds of the pardon power in ways never contemplated during past administrations. The multiple criminal investigations into Trump’s campaign, businesses associates, and perhaps the president himself have raised new questions about the scope of the pardon power. Can Trump use it to thwart investigations against him? Could he pardon himself? In Arpaio’s case, Trump has “pardoned someone specifically for flouting judicial authority,” says Lisa Kern Griffin, a professor at the Duke University School of Law, “which may be precisely what he is going to expect some of his associates to do in order to protect him.”
But some scholars see a different problem with the Arpaio pardon: It nullified the role of the courts to protect Americans’ civil rights. The pardon power, as laid out in the Constitution, is virtually unlimited. But in the case of Arpaio’s pardon, some prominent constitutional scholars believe the president exceeded his authority by overriding the constitutional rights of Arpaio’s victims”.
The main point of this case is:
“The argument is really about the role of courts in our constitutional system as the guardian of constitutional rights,”
As Redish warned in his op-ed, what’s to stop Trump from promising individual officials that he will pardon them if they violate court orders?
And it also ties into Gorden Libby’s pardon.
The pardon power looms particularly large over the Trump presidency because it’s seen as a possible escape hatch from prosecution by special counsel Robert Mueller. Griffin says of the Arpaio pardon, “I think it’s not unconnected to the president’s ultimate strategy to the investigations against him.” Trump’s pardon in April of Scooter Libby, who was convicted of lying to federal investigators and obstructing justice during another special counsel investigation, amplified this concern. If Arpaio’s pardon is upheld, Trump will feel freer to instruct witnesses not to testify against him and then pardon them when they’re held in contempt of court or perjure themselves. But if the 9th Circuit limits the pardon power, the question will almost certainly head to the Supreme Court for one of its biggest decisions of the past century on the separation of powers.