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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsGiuliani associate told ex-CIA officer a Trump pardon would 'cost $2m' - report
An associate of Rudy Giuliani told a former CIA officer a presidential pardon was going to cost $2m, the New York Times reported on Sunday in the latest bombshell to break across the last, chaotic days of Donald Trumps presidency.
The report detailed widespread and in some cases lucrative lobbying involving people seeking a pardon as Trumps time in office winds down. The 45th president, impeached twice, will leave power on Wednesday with the inauguration of Joe Biden.
The former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was jailed in 2012 for leaking the identity of an operative involved in torture, told the Times he laughed at the remark from the associate of Giuliani, the former New York mayor who as Trumps personal attorney is reportedly a possible pardon recipient himself.
Two million bucks are you out of your mind? Kiriakou reportedly said. Even if I had two million bucks, I wouldnt spend it to recover a $700,000 pension.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/17/rudy-giuliani-associate-john-kiriakou-trump-pardon?__twitter_impression=true
no_hypocrisy
(46,119 posts)Or would it be hard to find those assets if they were offshore?
Kablooie
(18,634 posts)So technically it's not illegal.
Just immoral.
TheBlackAdder
(28,208 posts).
"The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.
The meaning of the word emolument is contested in litigation challenging Trumps alleged violations of both the foreign and the domestic clause. But most dictionaries from the era of the USs founding define the word broadly. John Mikhail, a Georgetown law professor, looked at 40 different dictionaries published between 1604 and 1804 to try to determine how the word was understood at the time of the Constitutions framing. He found that 37 of those 40 dictionaries give it a meaning that would encompass sort of the profits of ordinary market transactions.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/22/20925403/emoluments-clause-trump-g7-resort-impeachment-businesses
Let's see how a Right Wing site describes this:
Compensation
Article II, Section 1, Clause 7
The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.
This clause accomplishes two things: it establishes that the president is to receive a compensation that is unalterable during the period for which he shall have been elected, and it prohibits him within that period from receiving any other emolument from either the federal government or the states.
The proposition that the president was to receive a fixed compensation for his service in office seems to have been derived from the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, which served as a model for the Framers in other respects as well. The Constitutional Convention hardly debated the issue, except to reject, politely but decisively, the elderly Benjamin Franklins proposal that the president should receive no monetary compensation. Perhaps the Framers feared that if Franklins proposal were accepted, only persons of great wealth would accept presidential office.
As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 73, the primary purpose of requiring that the presidents compensation be fixed in advance of his service was to fortify the independence of the presidency, and thus to reinforce the larger constitutional design of separation of powers. The legislature, with a discretionary power over the salary and emoluments of the Chief Magistrate, could render him as obsequious to their will as they might think proper to make him. They might in most cases either reduce him by famine, or tempt him by largesses, to surrender at discretion his judgment to their inclinations. For similar separation of powers reasons, Article III, Section 1, provides that federal judges shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, although that provision only forbids Congress from diminishing the judges compensation, not from increasing it. The distinction, as Hamilton noted in The Federalist No. 79, probably arose from the difference in the duration of the respective offices.
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The meaning of the Compensation Clause also arose in the context of President Richard M. Nixons papers. As authorized by the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974, the government had taken or seized President Nixons papers after he had left office. President Nixon (succeeded by his estate) sued for compensation for the taking of what he alleged to be his property under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The government argued that the Compensation Clause precluded payment of compensation on the theory that the presidential materials were the product of President Nixons exercise of powers conferred on him by the United States, and that therefore he could not sell them for his personal profit, even after his presidency, without impermissibly receiving an Emolument over and above the fixed compensation to which he was entitled. The district court rejected the governments argument, relying in part on a prior appellate determination that President Nixon was the owner of the materials in question. It found that President Nixons entitlement to just compensation had vested when the government took his property (i.e., after he had left office), and therefore that the plain language of the Emoluments Clause would not be violated because Mr. Nixon would receive compensation subsequent to the expiration of his term of office. The government argued that such a finding necessarily implied that a sitting president could sell his papers for profit during his tenure of officeto which the court demurred that those are not the facts in this case. The court also found, however, that the papers were not transferred to [President Nixon] by the government as compensation for his service in office, perhaps implying that a president could indeed sell his papers during his term. Griffin v. United States (1995). Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, however, presidents no longer have title to their papers, 44 U.S.C. § 2202, and so cannot sell them, thus obviating the issue of whether such sales would be emoluments.
https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/2/essays/84/compensation
Nixon was trying to profit from his papers after he left office. He probably would not have been able to do so in office.
It kind of looks like it's illegal: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/doj-investigating-potential-white-house-bribery-pardon-scheme-n1249609
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MoonchildCA
(1,301 posts)At the very least, its bribery, which is illegal, and there may be other charges involved.