From New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is Adali.

Today, in recent weeks, the president has been discussing the possibility of

pardoning his children and his lawyer to insulate them from crimes for which they have not yet been charged.

My colleague Mike Schmidt explains.

It's Friday, December 4.

Mike, tell me about this reporting that you have been up to since Donald Trump lost reelection.

I've turned my focus towards the question of pardons, the president's ability to end people's sentences in prison, and to wipe their record clean of any type of federal conviction.

Most presidents do pardons throughout, but the biggest, most complex, gnarly ones are often left to the last few days.

Why is that? Because pardons are essentially saying that this whole federal system that we've set up to hold people accountable for crimes, and that we put so much faith and emphasis in,

we're going to take part of that and throw it out the window and get you literally a get out of jail free card.

And Trump, like other presidents, has done them throughout. He's actually done fewer than other presidents up until this point.

Because he has not done them in a regular system like previous presidents.

In a traditional presidency, you would have the Justice Department's pardon attorneys examining applications about who should be pardoned, providing those recommendations to the White House, and for the White House, Camelto's office, the lawyers in the White House, helping the president to determine how to use that power.

That conveyor belt has not existed for the Trump administration.

Instead, you've had the scatter shot pardons for Republican icons.

Breaking news from the White House, the president has pardoned Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff, to vice president Cheney, like Scooter Libby, who was convicted of lying during the Bush administration.

President Bush deliberately refused to actually pardon Scooter Libby because he did not want to eliminate the finding of guilt against Libby.

Who pleaded guilty in 2014 to campaign finance violations and the conservative rabble rouser.

President Trump once again bypassing the Justice Department to fast track his pardon, arguing that D'Souza was treated unfairly by the government despite D'Souza acknowledging that what he did was wrong.

You had, in 2018, Kim Kardashian, lobby Trump directly for a pardon for a woman that she knew who was in prison, and Trump granting that despite the advice of the Justice Department telling him not to.

There's usually a legal process that goes along with pardoning people and commuting people's sentences, and the president just took one meeting with Kim Kardashian.

And then this year, we saw the president give them to people who looked like they had been convicted of crimes while covering up for the president.

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