Newt Gingrich talked about Trump pardoning people back in 2016

[DonViejo]

Updated by Garet [e-mail] Jul 21, 2017, 11:10am EDT

President Donald Trump had been asking about the extent of his pardon power as it related to his aides and family members in light of special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s expanding investigation, the Washington Post reported Thursday. It turns out this isn’t the first time people in Trump’s orbit have discussed his abilities to pardon aides from unspecified wrongdoing.

Trump surrogate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich discussed potential ethics violations in a December 2016 interview with Diane Rehm in light of Trump’s many domestic and foreign business interests. In the interview, Gingrich suggested that the president would have virtually unlimited ability to pardon aides:

(Trump) also has, frankly, the power of the pardon. I mean, it is a totally open power, and he could simply say, “Look, I want them to be my advisers, I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules, period.” And technically under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.

As Vox’s Andrew Prokop wrote Friday on the Post report, Gingrich wasn’t wrong about the lack of limitations on the pardon power:

The pardon power is incredibly wide-ranging. A president can pardon essentially all federal crimes at any point after they’ve been committed — even if they haven’t yet been charged or convicted.

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/21/16008400/newt-gingrich-trump-pardon-2016