Latest news with #Toobin
The Hill
10-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Toobin: Suspending habeas corpus would be ‘such a wild step'
Former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin weighed in on the White House considering suspending habeas corpus, or the right to challenge the legality of detention, amid President Trump's crackdown on immigration. In an appearance on CNN Friday evening, Toobin said pausing the legal principle would be 'such a wild step,' despite significant losses the Trump administration has faced in court over its efforts to speed up deportations of illegal immigrants. 'Talking about suspending habeas corpus is such a wild step. The only time a president has done it unilaterally without the authorization of Congress was Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, when Congress wasn't even in session and couldn't ratify what he was doing,' Toobin said on CNN's 'AC360.' He was reacting to remarks by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller earlier Friday, when Trump's chief immigration policy architect told reporters that the White House is 'actively looking at' suspending the principle. 'Well, the Constitution is clear — and that of course is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,' Miller said at the time. 'So, it's an option we're actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.' Toobin said on Friday that habeas corpus 'goes back to the Magna Carta in the 13th century. The idea that someone in custody has the right to go to court to challenge their incarceration, that is so basic to Anglo-American law.' 'And that's one reason why suspending habeas corpus is considered such an extreme, extreme step,' he told host Anderson Cooper the interview, first highlighted by Mediaite. 'This is an example of how losses in court is causing this administration to escalate its rhetoric. And we'll see where it goes.' The Constitution says the legal principle may not be suspended 'unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.' The principle allows those who are in custody to challenge the legality of being held in custody — helping prevent indefinite and unlawful imprisonment. Habeas corpus has allowed migrants to challenge their forthcoming deportations that the administration has instituted under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law. The writ of habeas corpus has been suspended four times: during the Civil War, in eleven South Carolina counties overrun by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, in two Philippines provinces during a 1905 insurrection and in Hawaii following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, according to the National Constitution Center.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Legal expert stunned by Supreme Court's "extraordinary unanimous rebuke" of Trump
The Supreme Court's Thursday ruling demanding federal authorities 'facilitate' the return of a mistakenly deported Maryland man marks a serious 'rebuke' of the Trump administration, former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin says. In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, the former assistant U.S. Attorney said the court's order in favor of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was a check on Trump. 'I think it's just worth pausing to recognize this was an extraordinary unanimous rebuke of the Trump administration,' Toobin said, highlighting the finger-wagging from the court's six conservatives especially. Still, the court's conservatives appeared to throw Trump a lifeline, scaling back a lower district court's order to 'effectuate' his release. Toobin worried that the instructions to 'facilitate' Garcia Abrego's return alone could leave Abrego Garcia in limbo. 'But what does that mean in the in the real world? The Trump administration has already said, 'Mr. Garcia is in the custody of El Salvador. We have no control over prisons in El Salvador so we can't get him back,'' Toobin said, adding that, given the Trump administration's relationship with the country, 'it seems like this is something that they could facilitate if they wanted.' The ex-prosecutor and legal analyst said the question of what levers the courts can pull to make sure the government does facilitate his release remains open under the order. 'The question is how hard will the Trump administration try to get Mr. Garcia back, if at all?' Toobin said. But the court's ruling alone marks a broader split between Trump and the high court, despite its reluctance to rule against him so far. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, installed by Trump on the high court just weeks before his 2020 election defeat, has become a lightning rod for far-right fury after joining the liberal minority to dissent against a ruling temporarily green-lighting Trump's use of the 1789 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to the El Salvadorian camp. Trump advisor and billionaire Elon Musk blasted the justice's 'suicidal empathy' in response to the ruling in a Monday X post.
The Guardian
23-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Royal authority': Jeffrey Toobin explores the US presidential pardon in his new book
'When it comes to pardons, presidents are kings,' Jeffrey Toobin writes in his new book, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy. 'No other provision of the constitution replicates royal authority with such precision.' The constitution expressly confers upon the president the 'Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment'. Toobin's latest is the book for our tempestuous times. Joe Biden delivered a blanket pardon to Hunter Biden, his son, a twice-convicted felon then awaiting sentencing. In his last hours on the job, the elder Biden pardoned a slew of family members. Last month, Biden's successor, Donald Trump, reportedly said, 'Fuck it, release 'em all,' then granted pardons and commutations to more than 1,500 January 6 defendants. For now, the Trump justice department seems distracted, waging war against itself. Main justice department officials and the US attorneys' office in Manhattan stand pitted against each other over the former's ordered dismissal of the bribery case against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York. Danielle Sassoon (the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York and formerly a clerk to the late supreme court justice Antonin Scalia) and Hagan Scotten (a federal prosecutor, Iraq war combat veteran and former clerk to justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts) made headlines with their resignations. Into this smoldering legal landscape steps Toobin, a long-established bestselling author, a former CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer now hired by the New York Times. Additionally, he is a former federal prosecutor. The Pardon is well researched and highly readable, a master class on a power wielded by presidents for more than 200 years. Most of the book, however, concerns events from a half-century ago: the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford, in the wake of Nixon's resignation over the Watergate scandal. The story is familiar, but Toobin offers new facts and insights. He shines a light on Benton Becker, a former federal prosecutor and friend of Ford whom Ford deployed to negotiate Nixon's pardon. Becker blocked Nixon's attempt to fly off with boxes of presidential records – but was in way over his head. Nixon called Alexander Haig, his chief of staff who was still at the White House, and ordered him to secure the records, Toobin relays. 'Ship them out here,' Nixon said. 'Send everything out here. I want all my records, all my papers and all my tapes.' Historically, ex-presidents had viewed their papers as their personal property. Haig followed orders but Becker happened on the boxes of records being loaded for shipment. He directed the Secret Service to stop the truck. 'I don't care if you have to shoot the tires out,' Becker recalled saying. 'That truck does not leave here.' Confronted in the Oval Office, Haig feigned ignorance. He also lied, according to Toobin. Outside Ford's presence, Haig told Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor, the records were en route to Nixon's home in San Clemente, California. In the end, the lawyers hammered out a compromise that heavily favored Nixon. He gave Becker a tie pin and a pair of cufflinks. Ford gave Nixon a pardon. It really is a remarkable tale. 'I had certainly never heard of Benton Becker when I went into this,' Toobin told the Guardian. 'If you want to address an issue that will be the central event of your presidency, maybe you want to entrust it to someone who is not a young volunteer lawyer, who is himself under criminal investigation.' (Becker, who died in 2015, was accused of misconduct in a stock-fraud case, then exonerated.) The Nixon pardon stoked outrage. Jerry terHorst, Ford's press secretary, found the pardon unconscionable given Ford had refused to pardon those who avoided the Vietnam draft. TerHorst quit. In the midterms, the Democrats ran the tables. With Jimmy Carter in the White House, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act, which made presidential papers government property – a law that Toobin reminds us 'was central to the 2023 indictment of former president Donald Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office'. 'For better and worse, pardons operate like X-rays into the souls of presidents,' Toobin writes. 'Gerald Ford revealed himself to be earnest, impatient, and overmatched.' Fifty years later, Trump asserts that if he does anything, it is axiomatically legal. 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,' he recently posted to social media, along with his mugshot, glowering at the camera in his Georgia election fraud case. For Toobin, the pardon of Hunter Biden reflects on the soul of his father. 'The fact remains that Hunter Biden stood convicted of 12 crimes – and he was, in fact, guilty of all of them,' he said. But Trump remains in a league of his own. 'If Trump had tried to carve out the non-violent January 6 rioters [for clemency], that would have been somewhat more defensible than what he wound up doing, which was, in my view, completely indefensible,' Toobin told the Guardian. Hagan Scotten wasn't concerned with presidential pardons when he quit last week, over attempts to drop the case against Mayor Adams. But as US justice comes under terrible strain, his words will long bear scrutiny. 'Our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,' he wrote. 'I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.' Lesson learned. But pardons will always be different. 'The powers of the presidency range from nearly absolute to barely existent,' Toobin reminds us. 'The pardon power belongs in the former category.' Much depends on the person who occupies the Oval Office. Right now, it's someone who views pardons as little more than weapons to be used for political gain. The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘X-rays into the president's soul': Jeffrey Toobin on Trump, Biden and the pardon power
To Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy, pardons are 'X-rays into the soul' of the American president who gives them, revealing true character. Pardons can show compassion and mercy in the occupant of the Oval Office. More often, they expose venality and self-preservation. Toobin said: 'One thing you can say about Donald Trump is that his moral compass always points in the same direction, and his motives are always the same, which are transactional and narcissistic. This is a good example, I think, of my thesis that pardons are X-rays into the president's soul.' In his first term, Trump 'wanted to settle a score with Robert Mueller, so he pardoned everyone Mueller prosecuted [in the special counsel's investigation of Russian election interference in 2016 and links between Trump and Moscow]. Trump wanted to take care of his family, so he pardoned his daughter's father-in-law, Charles Kushner [now nominated as US ambassador to France]. He wanted to reward his House Republican allies, so he pardoned several who were engaged in egregious corruption, and he pardoned people who were [his son-in-law and adviser] Jared Kushner's friends. Asked why he wrote his 10th book to come out now, so soon after such a momentous election, Toobin, a former CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer, said: 'I saw that from a very early stage in the campaign Trump was talking about January 6 pardons. But I also recognized that if Kamala Harris won, there would be pressure on her to pardon Trump' on 44 federal criminal charges now dismissed. 'I think the proper way to understand the January 6 pardons [issued on day one of Trump's second term] is to remember that Trump himself was a January 6 defendant. He wasn't charged with the riot the way the others were, but he was charged with trying to overthrow the election with the fake electors scheme. And if you look at the way in the beginning part of his second term he is settling scores and rewarding his friends, the January 6 pardons told you exactly how he was going to go about conducting his administration.' Reportedly saying, 'Fuck it, release 'em all,' Trump gave pardons, commutations or other acts of clemency to the absurd, such as the J6 Praying Grandma and the QAnon Shaman, and to the outright sinister: hundreds who attacked police, militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy. Toobin said: 'If Trump had tried to carve out the non-violent January 6 rioters [for clemency], that that would have been somewhat more defensible than what he wound up doing, which was, in my view, completely indefensible.' His point about pardons being an X-ray for the soul applies to Joe Biden too. On the page, Toobin decries the 46th president's decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, on gun and tax charges and any other grounds, having said he would not do so. Toobin said: 'When you think about Hunter, this is a guy who was convicted of a crime, who pleaded guilty to other crimes. So it's not like these were made-up accusations against him. Yes, the criminal justice system came down hard on him, but the criminal justice system comes down hard on a lot of people, and their father wasn't president of the United States, so they don't get this kind of break. And I just think that's not how the system is supposed to work.' Publishing schedules being what they are, The Pardon does not cover the last-minute pre-emptive pardons Biden gave his brothers, his sister and their spouses, as well as public figures held to be in danger of persecution by Trump, Liz Cheney and Gen Mark Milley among them. But Toobin told the Guardian: 'The family pardons were just bizarre, because these people, as far as I'm aware, are not even under investigation. But [Biden] was so worried and fixated on his family that he took this extraordinary step, which is just egregious to me.' The pardon is older than America. British kings could pardon people. When the states broke away, they kept the pardon for presidents. George Washington used it after the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, for men convicted of treason. Abraham Lincoln used it during the civil war, to reprieve Union soldiers sentenced to die and to forgive Confederates in the name of peace. Such acts of mercy continue, memorably including Jimmy Carter's clemency for those who dodged the draft for Vietnam and Barack Obama's record-setting issue of commutations for people mostly jailed for minor crimes. Even Trump handed down mercy in his first term, amid the push which produced the First Step Act, criminal justice reform he swiftly seemed to forget. Asked which modern president has best used the pardon power for the public good, Toobin picks Obama. Inevitably, though, most public attention falls on use of the power for controversial ends, including George HW Bush's mop-up of the Iran-Contra scandal and Bill Clinton's last-minute pardon for Marc Rich, a financier turned fugitive. The most famous pardon of all, the one Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal, hangs over every president. As Toobin sees it, had Harris taken office in January, pressure to pardon Trump of his alleged federal crimes would have been great, and it would have sprung from 'an interesting shift in the conventional wisdom' about Ford and Nixon. Sign up to First Thing Our US morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion 'It was widely considered a disaster in 1974' – Carl Bernstein told Bob Woodward, his Washington Post partner in reporting Watergate, 'The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch' – 'but now you've had Ted Kennedy giving Gerald Ford an award, saying he was right about the pardon. You have Bob Woodward changing his mind [to say the pardon was 'an act of courage'], and at the oral argument of the Trump v United States supreme court case [about presidential immunity, last April], Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, 'Well, everyone now agrees Ford did the right thing.'' Toobin thinks Ford did the wrong thing, given Nixon's clearly criminal behavior. He was also 'struck by the absence of a book heavily focused on that issue of the Ford pardon. So all those combinations led me to try to not only write a book, but have it come out in early 2025.' He duly devotes most of that book to the Nixon pardon: how Ford agonized about it, decided to do it, then employed an obscure young lawyer to make sure Nixon took it. 'I had certainly never heard of Benton Becker when I went into this,' Toobin said. 'And I think his central role illustrates how ill-prepared Ford was for the whole issue of dealing with Nixon, because if you want to address an issue that will be the central event of your presidency, maybe you want to entrust it to someone who is not a young volunteer lawyer, who is himself under criminal investigation. 'Now, if you say that, you should say that Becker [who died in 2015] was completely cleared. But it struck me as ludicrous that a president with the entire resources of the White House counsel's office, the justice department and the entire American government, chose to invest so much authority in this young man. I think that just illustrates how Ford's anxiousness to get the whole Nixon subject behind him led him to fail to consider the consequences of what he was doing.' The rights and wrongs of the Nixon pardon echo to this day. Looking again to last year's supreme court arguments over presidential immunity, which the justices decided did apply in relation to official acts, Toobin said: 'I thought the best question at that oral argument was Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson saying, 'If presidents are immune, why did Ford need to pardon Nixon?' Which is a great question, and doesn't really have an answer. The only real answer is that [Chief Justice] John Roberts just completely changed the rules' in favor of Donald Trump. The Pardon is Toobin's guide to how presidential pardons work, for good or often ill. He is not optimistic that the power can be reined in or usefully reformed. 'The both good and bad news is that our constitution is almost impossible to amend, and no one cares enough about pardons one way or the other to undertake the massive task of of trying to amend the constitution. It's not even clear how you would amend it. My solution to pardon problems is not changing the constitution, it's getting better presidents.' That will have to wait – at least for four more years. The Pardon is out now
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
What a President's Pardon Says About His Soul
'When it comes to pardons, presidents are kings,' the legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin writes in his new book, 'The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy.' It's not for nothing that President Trump, who has long been dazzled by royal pomp, was keen to brag about his pardon powers during his first term. 'I have the absolute right to PARDON myself,' he tweeted in 2018. 'But why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?' In some ways, Toobin's book is impeccably timed. In December, President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter despite previous pledges not to. In his final minutes in office, Biden went on to pardon five other members of his family. Trump, upon taking office later that day, pardoned or commuted the sentences of the more than 1,500 of his supporters who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Toobin completed this book before Trump started his second term, but in an epilogue he presciently predicted that Trump would issue a 'blanket pardon' to all of the Jan. 6 defendants: 'When he pardons them, Trump will, in effect, pardon himself.' But 'The Pardon' isn't primarily about Trump or Biden. Toobin explains that 'presidential powers of clemency' have their 'roots in the royal prerogative of mercy' — a strangely monarchical vestige for a democracy that had rebelled against the king. Still, early proponents of the pardon power insisted that it ultimately benefited the people. Alexander Hamilton called the pardon 'the benign prerogative' that would soften the harsh penalties of criminal law. 'Without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt,' Hamilton explained, 'justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.' From such lofty beginnings has flowed plenty of trouble. The fact that there is 'no check or balance' on the power of the pardon has invited 'chaos in the executive branch,' Toobin writes. As much as presidents like to cast pardons as unequivocal gestures of mercy, he maintains that they are better understood as political acts. Abraham Lincoln offered amnesty to ordinary Southerners in exchange for oaths of loyalty to the Union because he wanted to hold the country together; Andrew Johnson granted pardons to the leaders of the Confederacy without seeming to care about the potential for such impunity to tear the country apart. 'Pardons are manifestations of the presidential id,' Toobin writes. 'The unilateral nature of the power means that a pardon reveals a president's truest self.' Most of his book is given over to recounting what was — at least until recently — 'the most controversial presidential pardon in American history': Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. On Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon resigned from the presidency after the House Judiciary Committee recommended that he be impeached for obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal. Merely a month later, President Ford, who had assumed office after serving as Nixon's vice president, announced that he was granting 'a full, free and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon,' because the former president 'and his loved ones have suffered enough.' Toobin offers a granular narrative of all the secretive machinations that led to that day. Nixon knew that he couldn't be the one to float the idea of a pardon to Ford. Such an agreement would have been unseemly, making it look as if Ford was getting the presidency in exchange for a pardon. But as Toobin makes clear, there was also the matter of Ford's avoidant personality. Nixon was the consummate schemer; Ford was both blessed and cursed by his 'placid temperament and manifest decency.' Before Nixon's resignation, Ford had made a point of never asking him about Watergate; afterward, Ford continued not to talk about it. He delivered his most famous line shortly after being sworn into office: 'My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.' The line resonated powerfully with the public, but Ford, being Ford, fretted that the line was too mean to Nixon. Toobin traces the steps of this convoluted dance. Nixon wanted a pardon and pretended he didn't; Ford wanted to grant the pardon and had a hard time hiding that fact. Through intermediaries, Nixon used his papers and tape recordings as leverage, maintaining that they belonged to him and not, as Ford insisted, to the government. Toobin calls Nixon's gambit 'a form of extortion.' (Until the Presidential Records Act of 1978, a president's papers were treated as his private property.) Ford prevailed on the papers, but then felt, as Toobin puts it, 'he owed Nixon one.' By pardoning Nixon, Ford also thought he could 'spare the country' and move past the ugliness of Watergate. Toobin calls it a 'bad pardon for an honorable reason'; it helped stoke the very cynicism it was supposed to quell. (After years of legal squabbling, the papers and tapes were deemed Nixon's property after all, and in 2000 the federal government paid $18 million to buy them from his estate.) Toobin admirably weaves all these threads together. But what struck me most about 'The Pardon' was how bizarrely quaint all the wrangling over Watergate seems now, compared with the onslaught of our frenzied political moment. Take the notorious events of Oct. 20, 1973, known as the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor for the Watergate investigation. The attorney general refused and resigned; then the deputy attorney general refused and resigned. In 1973, Nixon's abuse of power was outrageous, but the immediate victims of the Saturday Night Massacre could be counted on one hand. Contrast this with what has happened in the last three weeks; the Trump administration has been firing people at such a breakneck clip that a bewildered public can barely keep up. Within days of assuming office, Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general. A week later, reports trickled out about the firing of more than a dozen prosecutors who had worked on the Jan. 6 cases. The same day, the public learned that Trump officials were 'setting the stage for a possible purge' at the F.B.I. by ordering the bureau to compile a list of all personnel who had worked on the Jan. 6 cases. The number of names is likely to be about 6,000. Trump isn't known for his consistency, but he has shown a consistent fascination with making bids for unchecked presidential power. Revoking birthright citizenship, unilaterally shutting down federal agencies, firing federal workers willy-nilly, handing over key government functions to the billionaire Elon Musk: Trump has been daring the courts to stop him; his vice president, JD Vance, has aired the possibility of defying those courts if they try to; and on Monday a judge ruled that the Trump administration had refused to comply with a court order to release billions of dollars in federal grants already allocated by Congress. Toobin's book offers little by way of consolation. Even in a democracy, 'the royal prerogative of mercy' has its appeal, especially during cruel times. But as 'The Pardon' makes exceedingly clear, it can also serve as a weapon for a leader who insists he can do whatever he wants.
