This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 17th, 2020. I'm cable Brown.

Roger Stone, a longtime advisor to then-Canada Donald Trump,

had his prison sentence for campaign adjacent crimes commuted by President Trump.

Just how broad is the presidential pardon power.

Cato's Gene Healy discusses the presidential pardon, Roger Stone, and the remote but real possibility

that this president will find a way to pardon himself on the way out of office.

Although I think I have some technical quibbles with the documentary Get Me Roger Stone. I thought it was very entertaining and probably fundamentally pretty fair to the guy

Mitt Romney has called this commutation,

unprecedented historic corruption.

And, well, I would go with corruption,

you know, it definitely has an odor to it, particularly since there is at least a suggestion, you know, hints of it by the President himself, the, you know, who praised Roger Stone on Twitter for not flipping and ratting and you know there is a question as to whether Stones testimony would have contradicted some of what Trump gave to the special counsel investigation in written answers as to what he knew about

WikiLeaks and the Stone's attempts to be a go-between with with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.

So there's definitely an element of of self-dealing here.

But unprecedented, I think, goes a little far.

I don't even think it's unprecedented in recent history.

There have been a lot of grotesque and corrupt pardons.

Bill Clinton pardoned Whitewater figure Susan McDougal who'd gone to jail for contempt of court after refusing to testify against Bill Clinton.

He also on the last day of his presidency I believe pardoned this guy Mark Rich

who was a federal fugitive who's probably not coincidentally who had arranged through his wife for massive, I think half a million dollar donation to the Clinton Library Fund.

So this certainly is not the first example of a, even in recent history of a president using clemency powers in a way that stinks to high heaven.

So pardons, and correct me if I'm wrong, pardons are a part of the criminal justice system, that is, if all of the other checks on the ability of the government to indiscriminately, or in some cases

discriminately in the wrong way, put people in jail if all of those fail there's this.

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