Really worried about this for three reasons:
1) The shear number makes me worry that the seditionists who have been arrested will be pardoned. I mean, how else do you hit over 100 pardons. I don’t even have words for how bad that would be for our country on every conceivable level.
2) I worry Trump will pardon some genuinely dangerous people who really need to be locked up for as long as possible such as Julian Assange, Robert Hanssen, Edward Snowden, Ross Ulbricht, R. Kelly, George Nader, etc just out of Matt Bevin-style spite/to distract from Biden’s inauguration.
3) I worry he’ll pardon a lot of horrible white collar criminals like Martin Shkreli, Andy Fastow, Bernie Madoff, etc and Trumpists like Giuliani, Bannon, etc because he thinks they’ll be able to fundraise for or provide political assistance to him in the future.
This whole quid-pro-quo pardon business is the sort of norm-shattering that could easily do irreparable longterm damage by turning pardons into a 100% political/transactional process that Presidents get comfortable abusing in truly dangerous ways. It’s already been abused every now and then, but this is something else.
Basically giving the power to the President to make unconstitutional decisions by allowing him to pardon the agents of the action between the time they have been ruled unconstitutional and the time that he leaves office.
The good thing about this is if he does pardon the insurrection, it is basically an admission that they broke the law and with them publicly upset that they still went to jail under his direction, it will basically be a slam dunk case for his conviction by the senate or any criminal tribunal.
