Trump’s Pardonpalooza
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2020
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law professor, senior Hoover Institution fellow, co-founder of the Lawfare blog, and co-author (with Bob Bauer) of After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. They unpack the presidential pardon power and try to figure out what Attorney General Bill Barr is up to with John Durham’s investigation of the investigation into the 2016 election.
In our Slate Plus segment, Mark Joseph Stern joins Dahlia to analyse what’s been happening at the Supreme Court in the last 14 days, including last week’s religious freedom decision weighing public worship in the pandemic, the latest Census case, and Justice Samuel Alito’s eagerness to hear from Pennsylvania.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're just seeing the beginning. |
| 0:07.2 | The official presidential pardon. |
| 0:09.1 | He's got several weeks. |
| 0:10.6 | The president out of the door needs to pardon his whole family and himself. |
| 0:13.7 | Once he starts doing it, I think it's going to be quite a cascade of pardons. |
| 0:22.6 | Hi, and welcome back to Amicus. |
| 0:25.1 | This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:29.4 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover some of those things for Slate. |
| 0:34.3 | This week has brought with it a whole lot of whiz-bang over the prospect of presidential |
| 0:41.1 | pardons, future preemptive presidential pardons, friends and family planned, presidential |
| 0:47.3 | pardons, and also continued fun at the Justice Department where every day seems to afford a little bit |
| 0:54.1 | more post-election drama. |
| 0:56.3 | And continued drama in the post-election lawsuits continuously filed by the Trump campaign. |
| 1:03.6 | According to Mark Elias, the current scorecard reads 1 and 42 today as of this taping. |
| 1:11.7 | We're also continuing to be battered by the claims of fraud and hoax and election stealing that emanate from the White House. |
| 1:22.5 | Meanwhile, COVID continues to devastate the nation, |
| 1:26.7 | surpassing all previous grim milestones, overwhelming |
| 1:30.3 | hospitals in some regions threatening to do so in the coming weeks almost everywhere else. |
| 1:36.7 | This is a crisis, and we ignore it at our peril. |
| 1:41.7 | Later on in the show, we will check in with Slate's own Mark Joseph |
| 1:45.4 | Stern about going on at the U.S. Supreme Court, including arguments this week, and a landmark |
| 1:52.0 | religious liberty decision around COVID that came while you were giving thanks on Thanksgiving. |
... |
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