On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily, SiriusXM host Alex Marlow asked Professor John Banzhaf of George Washington University Law School about the possibility that outgoing President Barack Obama – or maybe even incoming President Donald Trump – might pardon Hillary Clinton for the various offenses that have been investigated by the FBI, and could conceivably be reviewed by a special prosecutor in the future.
“I think it’s more likely that Obama would,” said Banzhaf. “In fact, the headlines today, the New York Post, ‘White House Open to Clinton Pardon.’ Politico, the Washington Times on the other side, they won’t rule out a pardon. There is, of course, strong precedent for it. When Richard Nixon was forced to resign, Gerald Ford gave him a complete and unconditional pardon not because he deserved it, but in his own words, to heal the country, to get rid of prolonged and divisive debate.”
“The same thing might very well happen here. Interestingly, if Obama were moved to grant the pardon, it might not only help him and Hillary and the Democratic Party, but it might also help Trump,” Banzhaf speculated. “Maybe I’m naive, but I take both Obama and Trump’s statements that they want to move forward, they want to heal, they want to get rid of the divisiveness.” “Trump has said over and over and over again, a centerpiece of his campaign, that Crooked Hillary is a crook; she ought to go to jail; there ought to be a special prosecutor. I don’t know whether he meant it or not, but if he goes ahead with that, and there is no pardon, that would be tremendously divisive,” he said.
“On the other hand, it would be politically difficult for him, having made the promise to appoint a special prosecutor, to now say, ‘Whoops, no, I changed my mind.’ But if Obama were to pardon Hillary, that gives Trump an out,” Banzhaf continued. “He can say, ‘Look,’ to his people, ‘I promised you that I would have a special prosecutor. I promised you I would put Crooked Hillary in jail. But Obama has given her, as Ford gave Nixon, a full and complete pardon for any crimes she may have committed, so my hands are tied. So let’s put that aside, and then I can go ahead with all these other things I want to do.’”
“We all know Trump is going to have a lot of opposition, a lot of divisiveness. Maybe he would feel he doesn’t need this one extra thing,” Banzhaf speculated.
“What a sunset for the Clinton years in American life, if that’s how it ends,” said Marlow.
Banzhaf closed out the interview by reporting that he was “not aware of any significant voter fraud, anything which would have come near to affecting the outcome” in the 2016 election. He and many other observers had feared such problems might occur, possibly even including a major foreign effort to hack into the American election system.
“We were all worried about cyber-fraud and so on,” he said. “I think we were well-advised to take the extraordinary precautions that we did, and we ought to be continuing to work on that so that the next election is even safer, and we don’t have to worry as much about the possibility of Russians or others possibly hacking and influencing the election.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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