This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, January 16, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Given the news of a deadly attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters,

the social media punishment exacted on the president and his

supporters, and a quick impeachment of the president, Donald Trump's

pardons have all but been forgotten.

Cato adjunct scholar Sahir Khan discusses the pardons of Blackwater security employees

who killed Iraqi civilians.

The pardon power is a broad power, it's not subject to much second guessing, unless pardons are in furtherance of crimes that are ongoing and a few other reasons, but in particular you expect the pardon power to be used to correct a past wrong to get people out of prison who by all accounts shouldn't be there,

to deal with, it's one last pressure valve on problems associated with our criminal justice system.

In the case of the pardons of blackwater agents, what do you suspect was the goal that

the president was, what was he trying to achieve by, with these pardons as far as you can tell?

You know, it's really hard to tell what exactly the goal of President Trump was to pardon these four gentlemen. I think it highlights for one thing a couple of things.

Number one that perhaps President Trump doesn't quite understand the role of pardons.

Pardons is something that the president certainly

has a right to do, but I think that it's a privilege

that should be exercised with caution.

And the second thing that is highlighted by these pardons is that

President Trump is trying to indicate that he can help certain individuals out, certain people that he views have been

convicted wrongly. These pardons to me though don't just make any sense.

He doesn't have a personal link with any of them.

He certainly has a link with Blackwater's founder, Eric Prince, whose sister is his education

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