Hi, this is Donald calling from Mesa, Arizona. I just finished submitting the first 24 pages of our high school yearbook for our first major deadline of the school year.

My students have embraced their inner journalists and covered remote learning, quarantine, spirit week, false sports, and more, and I'm so proud of the work that they're doing to create this book.

This podcast was recorded at 1.19 pm Eastern time on Thursday, December 3rd.

Things may have changed by the time you've heard this. Okay, here's the show.

I'm just as a former yearbook editor thinking about the challenge of just like a bunch of screen shots of Zoom windows.

How do you make this exciting?

My question on this is, he said that they were channeling their inner journalist. Are they past deadline? Are they bumping right up on deadline?

For me, that's the issue.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Asma Khaled. I'm covering the Joe Biden transition. I'm Tamra Keith. I cover the White House.

And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.

So one common tradition for outgoing presidents as they head out the door is to issue a bunch of pardons.

But in an usual twist, close allies of President Trump are suggesting that he should preemptively pardon himself, his family, and close aides.

So Ryan, let's start with a very basic sort of explanatory question, which is can a president issue a pardon before there's an actual conviction of any crime?

It is rare, but yes, the president can issue a pardon to someone before they have been charged with a federal crime.

You don't have to wait around for someone to be charged by federal prosecutors. The classic case of this would be President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon.

Nixon had resigned from office, but he hadn't actually been charged with any crimes when Ford pardoned him. In the way that Ford pardoned him, I went back and looked at the official text of the pardon today.

And he basically gave him a blanket pardon for any and all actions between two certain dates. And so it is possible to do that.

That is interesting. And is the president able to pardon himself?

Ha ha, now that. That's just a trickier question. It is an unsettled legal question, actually.

There are certainly people who believe that a president can do that. Donald Trump unsurprisingly would count himself among those folks.

He has said publicly that he believes that he has the power to pardon himself, but he's also said that he doesn't think that he needs to because he hasn't done anything wrong.

That was earlier in his time in office. It was obviously before the last weeks before he leaves, and the power to potentially pardon himself leaves office with him.

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