I am actually not sure that either the 'war on drugs' or a 'war on crypto' is a bad idea, but they do seem analogous.
He made a lot of money from the other criminal activity. That's what money laundering is: just because you're not directly trafficking children, for example, doesn't mean you have clean hands when you make significant profits from the people who are.
Crypto's problem is that when the law is updated to deal with these stunts, it's suddenly just a crappy version of the existing financial system.
It is both a reason not to buy drugs now (you're sponsoring all that other stuff) and a reason it's a ridiculous and immoral policy.
It is also on no way comparable to crypto.
The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.
That also happened to a lot of big banks over and over again.
Three days ago one of the biggest was found guilty for helping Sudan’s government commit genocide by providing banking services that violated American sanctions [0]. Sounds worst.
Binance is a casino for millennial and gen Z and like casinos is used by criminal to launder money.
Should Changpeng Zhao be pardoned? I don't know, I don't care he is a small fish.
Should BNP CEO serves prison time? probably.
- [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bnp-paribas-shares-fall-us-17...
The use of whataboutism and the ‘calling out’ of whataboutisms are both mechanisms of narrative control.
Regardless of what you think of the circumstances of the pardon, the prosecution was not related to fraud and was an unusual case by a DOJ that was recently embarrassed by FTX and was arguably symbolic in intent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
(this video has a nice timeline of the related events, including the GPU for crypto "deal")
Did he already pay the $4.3 billion? That's a lot of money, even for the federal government.
The status of each isn’t something I can readily find.
Puts an even grosser spin on this incineration of the rule of law.
Penalties within plea deals likely have different rules but given a pardon is a higher rung of absolution I am horrified to wonder if he could clawback any personal financial penalties he has paid or even seek compensation.
Years ago people would have thought you were talking about the DRC, Haiti or Uzbekistan. Today's it's the USA.
What actions that have been taken could actually be prosecuted? For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either. They are donations to the government and Congress has to appropriate that money too.
NOTHING is going to happen while the Republicans control congress, period. What could be done when the next administration comes in? Not just about the ballroom, but the various other things like this pardon. What of these actions are prosecutable?
"Well, when the president does it ... that means that it is not illegal" -- SCOTUS (2024)
That leaves impeachment as the only legal remedy, which you've correctly identified as not a possibility with the current congress.
Many are. This one is not. The President has sweeping pardon powers.
The solution is to strike the final phrase in Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution: “and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” [1].
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. (Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.)
With Presidents of both parties having so recently abused pardons, we may be in a place where a wave could pass a Constitutional amendment at the federal level, allowing it to be punted to the states.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level. That might get it through.
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution” [1].
No President. No courts. Partisanship may work to our advantage in a divided government. What you would need, however, to reach two thirds is some members of the President’s party signing on. That could happen if the President is taking a dump in the polls, and the opposition looks likely (but isn’t yet assured) to gain the Presidency next term.
> We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level
We need a plebiscite institution. But that can be done at state level for Constitutonal amendment approval. What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
speak for yourself. the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US.
We're not a direct democracy. You can't find proof of a pudding in a taco bowl.
Direct democracies fail in self-reinforcing factionalism. "When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government...enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens." This has consistently happened across history, even in small direct democracies, it's one of the essential takeaways from the Athenian experiment [1].
California is one state among 50. People using it as an example of some sort of government being bad are objectively in bad faith.
Please inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad? We are about to have a vote on voter ID laws, which I do not approve of, but what's important is that the people who care are able to have their will made manifest, and it will actually go up for a vote.
Meanwhile nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist.
If you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument, because california's shitty government predates democrat control, because it was always built as this crazy world where rich and connected people had control. California's government is built wrong, not because of democracy, but against it.
Straw man. Nobody claimed this.
> nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist
What are you referring to? “Finland has traditionally relied on the representative form of government, with very limited experience of the deployment of the referendum in national decision-making” [1]. And while Sweden and Norway have referenda, neither has binding referenda on demand or even a requirement for referendum to amend the constitution [2].
> if you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument
California features the largest and most powerful direct-democratic institution, its referenda, in America. It’s going to come up when we discuss direct democracy.
That said, I have no idea how you reach my comment and conclude that California is not only the only argument I make against direct democracy, but even essential to it.
> california's shitty government predates democrat control
Are you mixing up direct democracy and rule by Democrats, the party?
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-24796-7_...
This is total crap. Tale of Two Cities is set against the backdrop of Britain’s reforms, in contrast to the French Revolution. America has peacefully seen through Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting, FDR’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Era, each peaceful restructurings of how our government works.
Revolutions transfer and consolidate power. Reforms broaden them. Those who miss this lesson of history and fall for glorified fictions of peasants’ revolts earn a consistent fate across millennia of human history.
Side note: strongly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6E4_Bcmscg&t=14s
Gerrymandering is only relevant for congressional house elections, it can't protect the senate and doesn't influence the presidency. Usually one party will take control of all three branches in a huge swing in power, the house is the just the first to flip usually because it is re-elected every 2 years.
Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution, which in practice, means to do anything to the law. If we called one today, with most states in Republican hands [1], we’d be essentially handing complete control of our government—over and above the Constitution—to the GOP.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan...
No, it doesn’t.
It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution.
Any Amendments so proposed still require 3/4 of states to ratify them, either by votes of their legislature or by ratification conventions called in the states (at the option of Congress when calling the Convention at the request of states.)
Unless by "group of people" you mean not just the people in the national convention, but the people in the state legislatures or conventions, as well. But, at that point, you might as well say that by including an amendment process, the Constitution itself “gives a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution”.
I understand it's debatably possible to prosecute the public corruption that motivated a pardon, even though the pardon act itself is unreviewable. I.e., the DoJ attempted a criminal bribery investigation of Bill Clinton's pardon of the donor Marc Rich,
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/us/us-is-beginning-crimin... ("U.S. is beginning criminal inquiry in pardon of Rich" (2001))
> "Some lawyers have said that proving such a case could be exceedingly difficult because bribery cases usually required the cooperation of one of the parties. Moreover, contributions to political parties or to Mr. Clinton's library foundation are legal, and the president's pardon authority is unreviewable."
I assume similar logic might apply to World Liberty Financial and Trump's CZ pardon.
The pardon system in particular really pisses me off. The argument that one rando at the top of the pyramid somehow magically knows better than the entire judicial system is such a load of horsecrap. For any injustice that the pardon system might be able to correct, it can and does just as easily introduce more injustices.
Maybe it's funded by the $230M he's demanding from the Department of Justice?
The best opportunity for a major restructuring of the legal environment would bea Constitutional Convention, but because Republicans have pursued this as a strategic goal for a while, Democrats invested all their relevant energies in being against it rather than developing any kind of strategy of their own, guaranteeing that they would get rolled if one actually took place because they went in with wholly defensive mindset and no plan to win. The fundamental flaw of the modern Democratic party is that it sees itself as a vehicle for competent management of the status quo, not a force for implementation of its voters' political aspirations. Thus is pays lip service of what its supporters want but operates to dampen and delay those same supporters whenever it gets into office in the name of continuity and responsibility. It operates on a combination of political rent seeking and fundamental conflict aversion.
This is why I find myself increasingly impatient with self-styled moderates. Wanting to talk things out and compromise is good, but it only works when there is mutuality between counterparties. When the political opposition is indifferent to questions of truthfulness or corruption, moderation degrades into appeasement; moderates will sell out their own supporters in the name of peace and quiet, while giving away the strategic initiative over and over. The previous Trump administration engineered a mob overrunning Congress in an attempt to stay in power, and only failed because the Vice President declined to aid the scheme; a mistake the current one surely doesn't intend to repeat. The incoming administration spent a great deal of energy prosecuting every footsoldier they could find who set foot inside the Capitol, but shied away from going after the people who actually organized it. The results speak for themselves.
For anyone interested, for the past 30 years, Republicans dominated for 22 years in total, while Democrats only 8.
So my guess is that whatever Trump is doing now, he'll later argue was done as a president.
Second, should be convicted of anything, the best shot is if it's a state law violation. I'm going to bet everything I own that Trump will either pardon himself, all his cronies, and/or when the time comes, step down and have Vance pardon him. So with that all federal crimes become pardoned.
The supreme court has been very frank about this: The only, and I do mean the only mechanism is a successful impeachment. And even if Trump by some miracle is successfully impeached, we have no way of knowing how that will play out. The current supreme court majority are seemingly true believers of the unitary executive theory, so I'm guessing that with time - we'll just see Trump get more and more unchecked power. And since it's going to be done via the shadow docket, it'll likely be valid for Trump only.
I think for all intents and purposes - and I don't mean to sound defeatist when I'm saying this - people should just accept the fact that Trump will be untouchable for the rest of his life.
We need a reset.
I’m curious if any of the involved personell will ever be tried for that.
The President must first be impeached by both parts of Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_in_the_United_Stat...
The Senate runs a trial for the "high crimes" with the supreme court justice presiding. They can sentence a sitting president IIRC (or just remove him from office in which the DOJ can then prosecute normally).
- Trump’s most recent financial disclosure report reveals he made more than $57 million last year from World Liberty Financial
It's a vehicle to sell "access". The greed is only half of it.
The worst part is that they're selling access to foreign interests who pay them off. These people can't exactly show up with bags of gold to bribe King Sh*t Gibbon (yet), crypto is the next best thing.
QZ: <https://qz.com/trump-pardon-binance-changpeng-zhao>
Reuters: <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-convicted-bin...>
The Guardian: <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/23/binance-t...>
> "Since Trump’s election, Binance has also been a key supporter of his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, a business that has driven a huge leap in the president’s personal wealth."
"Huge leap" meaning $5 billion,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ... ("New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion")
May I never live to see such a thing happen in the US, but it doesn't feel unlikely.
Is it just media nostalgia? Trump was on the TV shows they liked and so they trust him more?
I agree with you on the personality side, but I also think his overall fame from TV, real estate, etc. is just as big a factor to his political success.
That said, in his domain, Trump leads; he generates the headlines and everyone else follows them.
Is JD Vance generating headlines? Barely. Is anyone else generating headlines? Lets consider a few:
- Tim Walz: mainstream media tries to meme Walz into being a headline generator, but he isn't, and poses no serious contention
- Mumar Gaddafi, Sadam Hussein, Hitler, Mussolini, etc: i'm not sure there has been a dictator that did not generate headlines.
- Steve Jobs: strong headline generator, such that he could have run for president and likely won
- pewdiepie: for a spell he was generating headlines, but mainstream media had no solid editorial narrative for the guy (and his hundreds of millions of followers) which posed a social risk. The more they discussed him, the more risk of society penduluming in some unpredictable way either by martyring him or amplifying his politics, so they chose the "ignore him and let whither" as a strategy which seemed to work, as he has drifted into Japan and been off-the-radar
- Luigi Mangione: a nonzero number of liberal voters would decry Trump in one breath and cast a vote for Mangione to be a politician despite evidence he is a cold-blooded murderer. This probably won't change much after conviction.
In conclusion, intelligent people are forced to lament the state of humanity in which leadership is game-ified so easily and yet so difficult to achieve. "How does one consistently generate headlines" is a difficult question to answer and seems to be one of the core essence of humanity. And, as described above, the origin of people's feelings of why a given person is successful.
It's a cult of personality that has taken over people's lives.
If you look at a slew of the recent pardons, the beneficiaries had already pleaded guilty. In those cases, the pardons should be ineligible. I think the most a President could do - should be - give defendants the ability to appeal the case to a new judge or jury. It's wrong and should be corrected! Added it to my todo list
Financially and personally, it's what they do to pressure you into submission. It happens from criminal cases all the way down to fucking family court. It's absurd and it's broken.
I truly believe that almost every single attorney should have to lose sleep at night over how their actions impact others.
Judges and juries are at least superficially removed from that sort of corrupt incentive system.
It is clear that they don't only do that, as that has not been their principal (or even a common) use for most of the history of the pardon power.
It is equally clear, however, that they do allow that; the check on that, like on most discretionary Presidential powers, is the Congressional power of impeachment; obviously, that is not a meaningful constraint when the Congress and the President are aligned on abuses, but the entire point of having separately elected bodies is to make it less likely that things that the public would see as abuses are supported by both political branches simultaneously. (Obviously, the fact that one whole house of Congress and 1/3 of the other are elected at the same time as the President, and that the weighting of the electoral college for the President are a blend of the apportionment to the House and Senate makes those elections less independent than one might want, even before considering the way the electoral structure contributors to partisan duopoly, though.)
Won’t somebody please think of the ~~children~~ turkeys?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_P...
Joking aside, Wikipedia does have a history of it. It goes way back, way before the USA was even a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_United_...
Because of the impossibility of law written in advance perfectly covering all cases and to provide a mechanism for correction of overpunishment that cannot be effectively anticipated in crafting general law. (That's more the reason why the traditional power of chief executives seen in state governments and the British government they were all more or less modeled on was retained when a federal executive was created; the US Constitution was very much not create ex nihilo in a historical vaccuum.)
> Besides corruption, bias, or self-interest, nothing else can come out of it.
Every viewpoint is "bias" relative to every other viewpoint, so that piece is a nullity, but it is certain;y not the case that corruption and self-interest are the only impacts or motivations for applying the pardon power.
Which isn't to say that there aren't arguments for putting more guardrails around the application of the power by the executive (or perhaps just radically changing the nature of the federal executive, to improve the application of its powers generally and not just the pardon power).
SBF stole user funds to basically role play as a billionare.
"The Foreign Emoluments Clause bars the president and other federal officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” without the consent of Congress. It reflects the framers’ desire to prevent federal officials from succumbing to foreign influence.
The Domestic Emoluments Clause provides for the president to receive a fixed salary and bars him from receiving “any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” It was designed to insulate the president against undo pressure from Congress or any individual state."
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/emol...
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/george-washington-...
Maybe it will serve as a reminder
> “It won’t interfere with the current building,” Trump said on July 31. “It’ll be near it, but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” - NBC
It seems probable he ignored any number of laws about how he did it, too.
Like Quatar and the used 747.
He's only out of office if he dies. There's no way he's leaving voluntarily.
I suppose one might assume he has some funds stashed offshore somewhere.
Two huge factors against him:
* Most people don't even know who CZ is, so this is meh-tier. People know SBF and find him repulsive, literally. Whoever puts SBF out of jail will face a massive PR backslash, he's not important enough to be worth that.
* SBF stole from the rich, the only real crime in the US.
Very few times you see someone who is equally hated by: the law, the public and the rich. He's screwed, lol.
The common theme to the donations ("payoff" or "bribe" might be more accurate), whether to D or R was to weaken any push for crypto regulations.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-ruin-ftx-documentary...
The way CZ managed to tie up FTX in a knot was a masterclass. (about 59min in).
It isn't about any of these people though. Trump is about only one thing: himself (a trade he shares with someone like KJU of North Korea). Specifically, as a narcissist, Trump is all about his image: business and might makes right, no matter the rules. Trump therefore hates the left, truth, honesty, ethics, empowering the weak and minorities, et cetera. Most importantly, he is signaling here: 'if you do business with me, we do the criminal path, and you get caught then I have the power to pardon your sentence.'
Whether Trump is currently a criminal or not, he was and is a convicted felon.
The above is also why I very much suspect Ghislaine Maxwell has dirt on Trump.
A pardon makes it all go away. None of the baggage of convictions follow. Finding a job or a place to live is something they can do, as well as voting again.
Personally I do not believe there can be PR backslash for convicted criminal voted in as president.
Right now, there is only about $500 in liquidity if you wanted to buy in at the 20% ask with a market order. After that the next sell limit order it as 96%.
However Binance guy knowingly commits money laundering and gets the pardon?
* Those victims who did not wait through the full asset recovery process and sold their debt to "vulture investors" for pennies on the dollar.
You can have whatever opinion you want about the bankruptcy process, but FTX was most certainly insolvent, due to fraud, and at that point whatever happened after the recovery to make people as whole as possible (which for many was not even close) really shouldn’t get credited to SBF.
Of course, if the bank is upfront that they take customer deposits to Vegas, then its fine.
You Americans elected a mobster as President.
Once is an aberration. Twice is your democracy speaking.
Serious controls need to be placed around the pardon power.
I'm joking! Everything will be broken by then.
Also as I understand it, while the can't be tried twice for the same crime Federally, it's still possible that they can be tried in a state court for committing the same crime.
.. but if you are trying to imply hunter biden, then fuck yeah I don't fucking care, put him in prison if that's what it takes.
To fill the time there are lots of narratives about non issues without evidence.
But again, you seem to be missing the point: a president pardoning people who support him is very different than pardoning ordinary people who were imprisoned for crimes that are no longer crimes.
Is there more to this comment than whataboutism? The core concern raised in this part of the thread is Trump's outsized corruption:
> It's all transactional. Do something Trump likes, he'll help you, laws, morals, and ethics be damned.
If they remove the guardrails keeping crypto out of the regulated financial industry (read: KYC and AML requirements), your bank deposits will absolutely be comingled with toxic crypto assets, because it will be way cheaper to avoid paying compliance people than the transaction fees.
Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.
I wonder where your misconceptions come from?
Fees are CURRENTLY around $1 because no one is using the L1 network. There is no demand now because of all of the times when the transaction fees were $30.
>Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.
The lightning network is insecure during periods of high demand because you aren't able to safely close channels. Also, you still need to fund channels on L1 in the first place!
People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump.
People will happily collect commissions selling products they know are scams or will happily collect management fees for parking investor's capital into grifts.
You'll never get truly everyone to recognize it, and it only takes one sucker at the poker table to keep every seat filled.
I recently heard of a real estate person that wound up buying an entire neighborhood around one of the stadiums for next year's World Cup. The impetus for this decision was to jack up the rates during the tournament, and then sell them off after. Another person thinks renting a bunch of Teslas and then placing them Touro will be another get rich idea during the World Cup. There are all sorts of people that think they are smarter than everyone else and are so confident they just cannot think of any ways their idea will fail.
In comparison, crypto looks like a rational product relative to that.
Dividing up the credit risk on a pool of loans so that some people lose money only if all the loans go bad is a very good idea. You just need to make sure they are good loans.
Part of the problem is that this seems to describe most of the economy now. Maybe not specifically money laundering, but it’s all a grift whether we are talking about Binance, OpenAI, or Skydance-Paramount. There are grifts everywhere which just encourages more grifts as people see the resulting success and lack of consequences.
> Who's going to give you anything for your bozo bucks? At this rate, it's not going to take long.
It's already here. Scan your eye-balls for some Worldcoins ($WLD) to prove you are not a LLM bot.
(Frankly, the idea that being convicted for making the conscious decision to go out of your way to circumvent KYC/AML laws is somehow the result of partisan bias is ridiculous in itself, so none of this [or how Balaji claims to feel about the matter] is even really relevant).
This is not a company vs. company sort of issue, this is a "I want to avoid regulations that would cost me money as a fundamental aspect of my industry " issue.
If Coinbase thought they could legally not worry about all of this, do you think they would want to deal with it?
The sheer quantity of money used in cryptocurrency for money laundering and activity where traditional payment processors will not accept payments (largely illegal, e.g. drugs, counterfeit goods) also means that the keeping the ecosystem healthy involves having ways for this money to flow.
For example if your crypto is the proceeds of ransomware, you're going to have a hard time cashing out without using something like Monero (which effectively has no offramps) without going through an exchange that knows perfectly well that you're trying to touch tainted goods. Exchanges like Binance that just don't bother to check who their customers are when they withdraw cash for such assets are just as critical to the ransomware plague as any security bug or social engineering issue. It's one of the reasons that pre-crypto, even though ransomware was technically feasible, it was never able to grow into a large-scale operation--no offramps. But hey maybe the official stance of CZ supporters is now that ransomware is good, actually, and if you don't like it it's because you have partisan bias (???)
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge of improper platform AML KYC implementation. Big banks routinely pay a fine for this, and never face imprisonment. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform. Credit where it's due, they somehow pulled off a 4 month sentence for this unprecedented charge. And now it's all for naught.
The laws exist to restrict funding for countries under sanction, drug operations, terrorist organizations, etc.
We can argue about whether these laws are a good idea (either in general or in specific details), but you need to change the law, not just now follow it.
This is a terrible precedent... unless you're a con man, that is. (Balaji Srinivasan isn't stupid. I would guess he understands how real what he's arguing here is.)
Reminds of Biden pardoning his relatives without even saying for what. Just blanked pardon for everything. No democrat dropped his jaw.
He feared Trump would force the DOJ to prosecute them.
And, based on what Trump's done so far with the DOJ and his enemies, he was right to do so.
I think this whole pardoning thing should go away. It makes the presidents Kings.
But something like that would fly in the face of the "Unitary Executive" insanity and would (I suspect) require a constitutional amendment, which is no longer remotely feasible.
A first comment said "without saying why". The second comment just says that this is blatantly not true, and that the rationale presented has been since confirmed as a very accurate prediction.
Everyone I talked to (more than 10, including myself) that I knew who voted for Biden was pissed, disappointed, even angry at his pardoning of Hunter.
No, its not, pardon and the closely linked power of clemency are common powers in representative democracies, often situated with the chief of state or the head of government (in the US, and other Presidential systems, the President is both), or sometimes the cabinet instead of the head of government in a parliamentary or semi-parliamentary system (in some cases, one or the other is assigned by law to a subordinate bureaucracy rather than being HoS/cabinet discretion, as is the case with pardon but not clemency in Canada.) It is generally more used in the US than other Western states, in part because the US has a much harsher criminal justice system with much longer sentences and much weaker provisions for relief other than executive pardon than other systems, but the power itself is common. [0]
The way it is used under Trump is wildly abnormal (for the US or the other representative democracies), though.
[0] see, e.g., https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/pardon-power-is-co... ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon ; etc.
And even if it were outright illegal, the Supreme Court has now ruled that the president is personally immune from criminal prosecution as long as they claim that their illegal activity was carried out in the course of their presidential duties, and not a personal crime committed on the side. Which leaves congressional impeachment and conviction as the sole recourse against presidential misbehavior. Which becomes a problem when the majority in Congress doesn't care that the president is doing illegal things. We haven't had a constitutional crisis like this since the FDR administration.
The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them
FB, Twitter, Tiktok on the other hand...
They will overlook everything else he does. Everything
To me, this sort of behavior just seems par for the course for how he has been acting since before his presidency. Did you follow his record in business and politics closely prior to voting for him? If so, what mitigating factors were there that let you still feel comfortable in voting for him?
Is this an isolated source of issue with him? Part of a broader trend? In either case, is it/these a big enough deal for him to lose your support moving forward? For the rest of the political party supporting him?
If there has been a shift in your ability to support him, what is it that broke the camel's back?
You could have literally opened a random page and order whatever is on there. It is perfectly safe to order the burger as you will most likely be served monkey brains anyway.
No one will rage at you for voting for Afroman. There are no dire consequences.
I can't really align myself to either party, and I am diametrically opposed to the Democrats on some issues, like gun control, and think that there are a lot of real issues that they push far to the extreme to the point that it is problematic, but... there's also only one party that attempted insurrection and overturning the election, campaigned on all sorts of insane shit, pushes a narrative of needing the military to deal with protestors, etc.
It's not two shit sandwiches, it's a pot of live pit vipers vs a pot of boiled unseasoned kale and spinach. I'm not going to enjoy the latter, but it's probably not going to harm anything more than my taste buds. The other might kill me.
But I knew Trump was shady and didn't like that he partied with Epstein in the 90s. A country takes a long time to change directions. I saw a chance for a smaller less restricting federal government. It was a gamble I was willing to take to at least get the ship turning around.
Trumps action with ICE will lead to waco situations. Undocumented immigrants can obtain guns in this country and will not continue to go quietly into the night. Seems to me that his actions are far more likely to lead to civil war
Now, if you are talking about citizens supporting an invasion against those that oppose it that is civil war. I agree that is a none zero possibility. However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
People need space to make a U-turn. I hope you get some grace because it's a lot easier to say "I told you so" than "I was wrong."
The problem is we dont believe him. There has been ample time to make a u turn. A decade at this point. Trump has never shied away from his corruption. He has been upfront about his intentions from the beginning. I just do not believe that this is the straw that broke the camels back when so many straws have come before.
Welcome to the resistance!
Just curious. Since you voted for someone who is a terrible President last time, what are you planning to change about how you make voting decisions next time? Are there particular people or media you plan to listen to less, and others more? Particular aspects you will weight higher or lower?
Your reps (or likely preferred choice of reps, if they didn't win their district) are enabling this, and don't give two shits about anything I say.
The recent "No Kings" protests were the largest in US history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...
I think at least some of that 1/3 has their own problems that prevent them from being able to devote energy to politics
Try living on or very near the poverty line, and then try and spend time worrying about politics. You are worrying about much more real (to you) problems.
When shit gets bad enough to motivate people on the poverty line, you're in deep shite.
IMHO those words are based on an immature understanding of human beings and their limitations.
We not only have physical, financial, and temporal limits; even more powerfully, we have emotional limits. When we're scared or traumatized, we often can't act except to keep things immediately safe as much as they can; we are in survival mode. That's also how bad leaders get good people to do evil things - terrorize them, push them into survival mode, and direct their fear at the leader's targets.
What we can do is recognize those mechanisms and limitations in ourselves, using empathy (a universal human trait), our frontal cortex, and compassion - always the first step to taking of our emotions and being effective - and recognize it in others. Calling them names only traumatizes them more. Empathy and compassion gets them to a better place where they can act. It's not easy - that's why the word 'courage' exists; that's why it's sometimes called, 'grace under pressure'.
Effective leaders know this. What we're missing - what so many people are missing - is good, effective leaders. AFAICT, the leaders we'd expect to rise to this occasion also are traumatized - and they have an obligation to do better if they want to be leaders.
You can’t ’out empathize’ someone doing 24/7 manipulation against people.
The only thing that works are real consequences against bad actors.
And that there was no real consequences for bad actors is exactly why we are in the situation we are in now.
I’m following politics and I have my opinions about things but you can be sure I won’t be discussing them with coworkers and friends.
These tactics include: consolidating polling places in urban areas; restricting the ability to submit an absentee ballot or otherwise vote by mail; restricting early voting; voter ID laws; and "poll watchers" who intimidate those at polling places, sometimes illegally.
Moreover, those forced to vote in-person at polling places are not given time off from employment to do so. This overwhelmingly disenfranchises the working class, who just so happen to overwhelmingly vote for progressive policies that favor the working class over the middle/upper classes.
Also, while I believe more Americans should be protesting, people in other countries (like myself, at one point) may have an inaccurate idea about what heavy US protest "ought to" look like in the media they see.
We'd love to be protesting at the iconic White House and federal Capitol building, creating horizon-to-horizon crowds for the rest of the world to marvel at... But for me (and ~40% of the population) that's a 3500-3700 km trip. How often would you expect someone in Portugal to travel the distance to Moscow for a day of protest? (Worse, assume no good trains.)
Instead, we gather at local state locations, which will typically not get shown (or recognized) internationally, except when folded into a sentence about how "millions protested across the nation."
Honestly, the billionaire is less corrupt-able than the DNC nexus (we all know Biden wasn't running the show, and neither would Harris).
This is satire, right?
Why would you think that? Do you think that presents from foreign dictators (like plane or investment in crypto fund) are less corrupt?
This kind of vague fluffy language is becoming very common. What evidence? Where is it coming out from?
If anything it would be a counter argument. Always strikes me as odd that Biden is somehow both a senile decrepit old man and a criminal mastermind depending on which is most useful at any given moment.
Regarding CZ and Binance and the Trumps, they have kind of a symbiotic relationship.
After Binance and CZ pleaded guilty to money laundering in November 2023, for which they paid over $4 billions in fines, WLFI (which is a clone of AAVE belonging to the Trump family) launched a stablecoin called USD1. Magically on March 2025, $2 billion flowed into Binance through MGX, a state backed Abu Dhabi fund, later revealed to have been paid in USD1 (two months before it was unveiled and without at the time no effective audits), effectively propping WLFI’s coin (backed, unbacked, nobody knows, I assume backed). CZ applied for a presidential pardon inmediately after in May 2025.
WLFI now gets to earn about $60–80 million per year in yield from the USD1…
…As long as Binance doesn’t redeem those $2 billion.
I still don’t know what MGX got out of this deal, but I am pretty sure they didn’t walk empty handed.
Reminds me of this Bill Gates quote: "We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive."
I don't know which is worse, that 32% were in support of the corrupt leader or that 68% in total are either supported him or didn't care enough to support anyone else
Or, they were not fine with whoever won.
We've got two abismal parties to choose from. Yes, there's an agument for voting for the lesser of two evils, but it's not a great one.
I'd like to believe at least some of those 36% would vote for a decent candidate/party. But once you lose faith in the system, and realize that it doesn't represent you, you might just stop participating in it.
That's your choice. "I don't participate at all" doesn't work unless it makes the whole trolley go poof.
There are just two possible outcomes: Dems or Reps getting power. That's the switch options you have. "Not Voting" simply means letting the trolley take the Rep route and being JUST AS CULPABLE for the results as every single republican voter.
Your fantasy of "not voting" being an actual moral option is like arguing "I disagree with the concept of a trolley, so I'm just going to turn away from the switch". You're morally exactly as culpable, because you made a choice that is morally the equivalent of "not switching tracks".
Voting for party A/B is a reward that encourages party A/B to do more of what they're doing.
So let's say only 1000 people voted because everyone else hated both options. That would pave a path for party C that would not exist if everyone held their nose and voted for crap.
Fortunately the Czech president does not have that much power.
If you vote for team A and they win and then do something bad (inevitable), shouldn't you be morally responsible for that? After all, you seem fine claiming non-participants have moral culpability for whatever the winning team does.
This seems incredibly obvious. If my options are "don't bomb children" and "bomb children", there's an obvious choice and obvious culpability. If my options are "bomb children" and "bomb way the fuck more children" the choice is also obvious.
You do not get to pretend a moral dilemna doesn't exist just because you're not a fan of the available choices. You are still culpable.
This false equivalence is exactly what counts for being "fine with this corrupt leader."
Sure. There are a lot of other people like you. Political operatives work hard to find folks like you, because groups who won’t vote are groups you can transfer resources from. (Same, oddly enough, for folks who will vote for you regardless of what you do. You can take advantage of that loyalty to buy votes on the margin.)
It’s dumb. And it directly undermines the causes you and others like and around you support, because again, your devoted non-participation creates political capital on the other side of any issue you would have voted on. But it’s common and a real part of any electoral—possibly political—system, and no elected who wins and keeps office can afford to ignore the free resources predictable non-voters offer up.
Uh, then don't. I guarantee you have more people and issues on your ballots than the person who allegedly sent your friends death threats.
> neither party really supports what I want so voting for one would hurt the causes I want anyway
If neither party has any position you give any shits about, yes, I sort of agree you shouldn't be voting... (And I guess I'll concede you aren't voting against your interests and causes if you have no interests or causes.)
No, we have one destructive/harmful party (R) and one status quo party (D). They are not the same level of bad and that's immediately obvious from this last year.
To compare the two parties with a house on fire, absolutely the sadistic pyromaniac arsonist burning down the neighborhood one house at a time is a bad guy and needs to be stopped. But when person trying to rally everyone to go after him is the abusive slumlord, it doesn't always resonate as effectively as it might.
A healthy society wouldn't tolerate either one. I wonder if the Democrats seeming inability to stop right-wing abuses has been partially motivated by the knowledge that successfully stomping out that sort of corruption would curtail their own abuses, too.
Absolutely. And we know this because when they were last in power they did nothing to counter corruption or limit executive power. Instead they were partaking in it.
Trump is exploiting a system his predecessors created.
This is only a remotely viable claim if you think the two evils have extremely similar amounts of evil.
I still voted, because my personal laziness or moral superiority does not trump the very real world effects of the "bad ones" winning. Lazy people like you with post hoc rationalizations exist here too, and they're just as bad and wrong.
Why? Milton hired Pam Bondi's (the US attorney general's) brother to represent him.
It's because you are still thinking of the USA as a democracy. Musk helped buy the election for Trump. It's an open oligarchy since companies were allowed an opinion as if they were citizens.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
Don't think fox news is going to report that he enriched the prez...
This is despite the fact that Hunter was gone after on a charge that is basically never enforced alongside a media and political campaign ramping up all sorts of lies and half-truths and trying to draw connections to things he was never on trial for, much less convicted of, with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
I don't like that Biden pardoned his son, but I also think the idea that it is at all comparable to the pardons Trump has issued that are blatantly corrupt is absurd. Meanwhile, Jan6 pardonees have a whole Wikipedia section detailing all of the crimes they have gone on to commit since being pardoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_January_6_United_Sta...
See again:
> with an incoming president that had spoken extensively about his desire to weaponize the government to enact revenge on his political rivals, which we have seen him do extensively already.
2. Hunter's pardon was still wrong and widely condemned by dems.
Biden misused the office to pardon his son but he was not corrupt.
I’m not supportive of Biden pardoning his son. But it’s inarguable that the Trump administration is orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden’s was. To say “they’re both corrupt” is to flatten everything out to meaninglessness.
It is not accurate to say that half of Americans are ok with this. It’s just our system doesn’t allow for doing anything about it except wait.
That even a third is okay with this is a clear enough signal. He represents their values.
"Healthy democracy"
This is the most embarrassing part of all of it. The US is ping ponging between two very different ways of misusing state power.
CZ was charged with violating a highly technical US securities law that is not common to most countries despite not being a US citizen or ever setting foot in the US. His crime was letting his employees (also non-US and under no affirmative obligation to learn the laws of every country in the world just because they run a website) tell crypto whales they could use VPNs to get the non-US, non-nerfed version of Binance.
The public's interest in protecting crypto whales from Binance is extremely tenuous. Unsophisticated users would hit the geofence. These were whales using Binance because they wanted to, not because they were tricked.
The US's right to enforce arcane securities law outside its own borders is also very tenuous. If every country pulls this level of aggressive enforcement of atypical law on every website (even geofenced ones!) we will have total chaos. Should China, Russia, or India be able to hunt you down for violating some arcane law? No? Then why should the US?
This is also happening in the context of an active public debate over the application of this law within the US, one cryptocurrency supporters won fairly definitively in the last election.
Whatever discretion the law provides US enforcers, they should have recognized that it was wrong to use that discretion and left CZ alone once Binance made reasonable gestures at compliance.
Instead, once their political coalition signaled that they should put symbolic heads on platters, they went about scoring career points. This is the kind of misbehavior that drove Aaron Swartz (a friend of mine) to suicide. We should be clear that it's wrong.
And here we are. A choice between venal corruption and cruel punching down at immigrants on one side, and a blind, symbolic use of power for power and ideology's sake on the other.
They've normalized corruption irrespective of magnitude. That's partly a problem of the little corruption existing in the first place. But it's also a problem of education and tribal populism being given this much power.
On a baser level, if you go on twitter, there's a whole slew of delusional people who either don't believe this because of "fake news", another portion that's in the same "Clinton/Obama/Biden were even worse", and the rest just doesn't even care so long as "the libs are owned".
And if it does break through the right info bubbles, right-wing media pundits and influencers will be on-the-ready to quickly rationalize or what-about it away and coax their audiences back to their "happy" places, where they can nurse their favorite grievances about the left, the media, the trans people, etc
It is the loss of complexity. Many cannot understand that by choosing the lesser of two evils does not mean you support evil. It means your choices are limited. We have turned the political issues into good and evil, rather than disagreements in how to achieve our mostly shared goals. We can no longer see the other side as friends and family, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyone countering this can just proclaim "both sides" and in some sense they will be right, they have evidence and people do abuse that framework. But at the same time that destroys the bridge between us. The abuse of calling both sides evil along with the accusation that all use cases are instances of abuse. It binarizes the environment, creating a simple world where there are only two choices. Which is easy to do when everything is so complex, as we're so tired and don't want to think.
It's also why this administration's strategy is so effective: overload the opposition. After all, Brandolini's Law states: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." They've weaponized it. It's an effective strategy, and hard to defend against. I'm sure someone will offer a solution, "it's so simple, you just..." and we perpetuate the game.
Most people can't keep up with the firehose of news and don't really want to. This particular bit of unethical behavior is just one more bit of inconsequential news which will have completely disappeared from the headlines by tomorrow. It basically never happened to 95% of the country, regardless of political leaning.
Secondly, conservatives live in their own highly filtered and mutated information bubble. Good news is amplified, bad news is either downplayed, justified (pure fiction is acceptable) or simply ignored. So even if they do hear about this, it won't be a big deal.
In short, most people won't care, and conservative media will actively work to overlook or more often, rationalize this sort of unethical behavior to the point where it somehow is totally fine. (Simply read this thread to watch it happen in real time.)
You assumed the leader is corrupt, possibly assumed the leader has bad intentions, and that the world can't possibly be more complex than these assumptions. Assumed the leader made this choice instead of a team behind him.
Then presented a generality. Possibly assumed he doesn't know more than you and "everyone who won't say anything".
Called an entire administration a circus. Another generality.
Suggested bribery without evidence.
How does one respond constructively to a comment like this?
He served 4 months for a laundering case , and has built the most successful exchange. There are bankers and vcs doing far worse things. He deserved the pardon , and no, he doesn't control bitcoin
/$
So yes, there is a difference between what Trump is doing and what Biden is doing.
edit:
He actually pardoned 5 family members for all non-violent offenses from jan 2014 to jan 2025, does 1 billionaire = 5 biden family members?
Also, how on Earth are their "crimes" as egregious as those that Trump has pardoned in his recent term? Seriously, what did they do? How many people did they hurt? You can't just say "corruption" in an ambiguous sense, because then millions of other people would also apply. Also, "I don't know but it's fishy!" doesn't work when we know literally everything in Hunter Biden's life. That was the whole controversy.
The Binance founder directly impacted people in a significant way. The rioters were violent protesters that resulted in loss of life and others fearing for their life. It isn't the pardon itself that is bad, or the number, but the message it sends as to why they would do it. Biden was "if you're in the family of the president, you'll get forgiveness for your poor life decisions". Duh, like it or not, that's always been true, and Biden got roasted for it anyway. He's done, his family is out.
Trump is "if you're rich or you worship me, literal crime is legal".
The problem seems to be that we have unjust laws and punishments. We should have some way to apply mercy in that case. For example, I (hope to) see a future where people jailed for MJ related crimes get a mass pardon.
The solution is to fix that and make it retroactive. Remove the unjust law and release anyone who was convicted for violating it.
A pardon is just a bad, unfair bandaid fix.
The decision is a lot more respectable than "this guy gave me a bribe." They are worlds apart. And some may be theoretically willing to roll the dice on that for their family, but it reads naive.
And all of the members of Congress on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack for anything having to do with their role on that committee.
Schiff was on that committee. He said the pardon was unnecessary and unwise.
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-jos...
If he’d pardoned a whole team of people he’d also signal to the world that he believe they are guilty too.
Of course, once it is done by a president representing the party you (generic you) feel affiliated with, the double standards inevitably kick in.
Less that, more we're all aware of what Trump campaigned on and what he promised to do to Biden's entire family. And we're disheartened that there's cultists (not you) trying to convince us that we should let our families suffer if dear leader demands it.
I don't know these people, I don't have a strong feeling if any of them go to jail for something they did, because I'm not in a personality cult. But I care a lot more if people are going to jail just because a more corrupt person got the keys to everything. Turns out, those fears were valid, and I'm increasingly alarmed that there's still so much vitriol towards Biden pardoning a checks notes gun charge, than there is for the blatantly corrupt shit we see every day.
Biden's use is far more forgivable, as it's a given that his son was being prosecuted politically to punish Biden (though certainly he was guilty) and would likely have been prosecuted more under Trump, like Comey is being prosecuted today. And certainly "saving your children" is a far more forgivable sin than naked bribery, but being better than Trump is a low bar, but it's still not okay to excuse criminals from punishment because they have an important family member.
And I say this as someone who despise Trump. A broken clock can be right twice a day.
So, a net negative impact on society.
It’s probably good that Biden took away this particular show trial option from them.
Disloyalty is the worst crime around Trump. You must never stop proving your loyalty. Just look at videos of their meetings.
Each person speaking must first have a little sermon praising and thanking God, oh sorry no, not God, I meant Trump.
the substance of the pardons matters a great deal, as well.
6 years of investigation and all they could find was that Hunter did drugs and owned a gun. I am sure if we drug tested congress, we could prosecute a bunch of congressmen for the same crime. Maybe thats why supreme court is looking at the constitutionality of the law and its all been ruled unconstitutional in one of the courts districts but hey lets prosecute Hunter Biden for it.
Trying to minimize Hunter's significant legal problems to "he did [many hard, highly regulated] drugs and [illegally] owned a gun [which was thrown into a dumpster]" is disingenuous and factually incorrect.
Hunter's (and other Biden family member's) legal issues were so plainly severe, with a near-guarantee of prison time, President Biden was forced to issue an unprecedented, unconditional pardon for "offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024." A decade-long period during-which any crimes Hunter committed were erased and forgiven.
Nobody is above the law? This was Biden's own DoJ.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco-weiss/pr/grand-jury-ret...
And from what we've seen, he was right to do so. Although, they've been angling to declare his pardons void so they can go after whoever they wish.
Are pre-emptive pardons a common thing for American presidents to do?
Sadly I think Biden's choice was completely rational given how Trump is weaponizing the US justice system.
Ha ha. They (democrats overall) need to look inwards for that.
> Same reason he pardoned Fauci and others. Fauci screwed up our country so bad, it aint even funny. The fact that he needed a PRE-EMPTIVE (i.e. he wasn't even accused of anything at the time) pardon says it all. And the fact that Biden gave it to him, says everything there is to say about Biden.
> And from what we've seen, he was right to do so. Not even close.
> Although, they've been angling to declare his pardons void so they can go after whoever they wish. They should.
- Look at what Biden did to the southern border. And look at it now. - Look at almost any "democrat" run major city. Any. Then look at the crime rates and cost of living. - And the recent farce that was this "No Kings" crap...
Trump isn't perfect. Far from it. He's got major flaws, both in character and execution. However, name any major policy initiative that he's undertaken that is bad for the "country". As a whole.
This is a ridiculous standard. Each of his policies (individually) only hurting some Americans is not a flex.
The totality is what matters, not you, not me.
They're usually not that bad for his billionaire grifter buddies, I'll give you that.
That’s how ICE has always worked, this is not new. “People who get assaulted” - seriously? Catching people who break the laws of our country is “assault”?? Show ID to who? People who are not even supposed to be here?
That’s laughable.
Tariffs
You may not notice it yet, but he has ruined the reputation of your country. People consider it insane to travel there now for vacations. We are actively avoiding American garbage. We are migrating away from American clouds.
He is focussed on short term bullshit while what matters on the world stage is soft power. America was considered trustworthy, the defacto leader of the world.
Now you're just a bully, an impotent one at that. You are no longer taken seriously.
You will notice the effects eventually, possibly after Trump is already rotting in his grave.
And they are not “our” treaty commitments. Treaties by definition involve more than one party.
But out of curiosity, what commitments are talking here? Talking in abstracts is meaningless.
Nice to see the people who fucked it up isolated from the consequences of his second term. (/s)
That is until you see what's currently happening, the President personally directing the DOJ to arrest his political enemies, of which Biden and his family are considered to be primary antagonists (remember they labelled them the "Biden crime family" and chanted "lock them up"). That is the most banana republic as it gets, so how is preemptively defending against that behavior out of bounds?
* Using the justice system to corruptly punish the opposition and prevent them from competing in elections,
* Using the security/military/law enforcement establishment to simply kill the opposition,
* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish, to coerce media into friendly, or at least out of critical, coverage,
* Using the regulatory bureaucracy, and/or the security/military/law enforcement establish to reward people providing personal material benefit to the leader, or to punish those not doing so,
* Using the pardon power to assure that crimes committed in the course of doing any of the preceding items are unprosecutable
Pardoning family members, by itself (provided that the standards applied are different than those that would be applied to non-family members), is certainly corrupt as a form of nepotism, but hardly the outer limit of banana republic behavior.
… says the conspiracy theorist spouting Breitbart nonsense
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/07/biden-gra...
Trump is forgiving friends of debts to the US. Blatantly. He is for sale and always has been.
Hopefully we get to try from scratch a third time if that happens but I worry that collapse will be too tempting for Russia or China to not step in.
Maybe we can be lucky and get conquered by Canada first in that case? What a weird thing to think...
Until the Dem party fixes their brand and wins back some of the Senate seats they used to control in the 90s and early 2000s there will be no positive progress.
There were only 13 states when the Constitution was ratified. It was never envisioned to be as disproportionate as it is today, with California's two Senators representing 40 million people vs. Wyoming's 0.6 million.
We know, from comparative study of existing representative democracies, how to do that better (have an electoral system for the legislative branch that provides results that are substnantially more proportional than under the current system); what we don’t have is a practical way to get from where we are to where we need to be given the construction of the electoral systems in the states and nationally and the politicians and interests that has entrenched and the Constitutional amendment process.
States can reject dumb amendments. Congress proposes amendments, the states ratify them [1].
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-5/
Do you mean the French Revolution? If you actually read the history on that (even basic stuff beyond the "Reign of Terror") I don't think any person would want to experience that for their country. It had tons of indiscriminate violence and took a decade of chaos before they sorted out into a real government, which then resulted in Napolean's coup
(I've read that the French are talking about a Sixth, given that they've gone through several prime ministers in the past few weeks/months and seem unable to maintain a government long enough to pass anything.)
[1] https://thegoodlifefrance.com/short-history-of-the-five-repu...
Sounds reasonable. This is ok for Trump to do because of Hunter Biden.
I think I would support those pardons even though I think Trump and his family and his cronies are acting the way really bad people act.
Taking the above scenario as license to sell pardons for person gain is such a stretch it looks like bad faith to me.
And the dysfunction of congress probably works in our favor here since pardons should be exceptional - not routine. A routine pardon is just a demonstration of the justice department failing at a systemic level.
The Department of Justice is subordinate to the President as part of the executive branch with or without the pardon power; if you want something other than "the President overrides the Department of Justice" as a matter of Constitutional law rather than an intermittently-observed convention of restraint (which Trump absolutely has not observed outside of the pardon power), you need a fundamental reformation of the Constitutional structure of government, far beyond the elimination of the pardon power.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates. The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law. This is not a “convention of restraint” but an operational necessity derived from the Take Care Clause (“he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”). That clause doesn’t mean “whatever the President says is law”; it means the President must ensure that the law itself is enforced faithfully, even when doing so constrains his own interests.
Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ. Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences. Our system is not designed for a monarch with “absolute control” over prosecutions. It’s designed for a chief executive bound by law and accountable through oversight, impeachment, and ultimately, the electorate.
The idea of the republic as opposed to a monarchy is that no part of the government is anyone's personal...well, anything...but that doesn't really negate the degree of control the President exercises, both in theory and in practice barring highly variable personal restraint, over the DoJ.
> The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that while the President may remove executive officers, he cannot lawfully direct them to commit acts that are unconstitutional, obstruct justice, or violate statutory mandates.
That doesn't mean the President doesn't override the DoJ, it means the President doesn't override the law.
> The constitutional structure also relies on normative independence - a separation within the executive branch that maintains rule of law.
Yes, that it relies on this but does not actually provide any mechanism by which it can effectively be assured is the fundamental design issue I am referring to being necessary to address if one wants "the President overrides the DoJ" not to be a simple fact independently of whether or not the pardon power exists and is vested in the President's discretion.
> Finally, while the pardon power is broad, it’s not the linchpin of executive authority over the DOJ.
I literally said that the pardon power is irrelevant to that, which is the exact opposite of describing it as the lynchpin.
> Removing or limiting that power wouldn’t change the fact that the DOJ’s prosecutorial discretion must still be exercised consistent with law, ethics, and constitutional constraints - not simply the President’s personal preferences.
To the extent that is true, that is only a negative constraint on prosecution applied by the courts, it can never compel a prosecution that the executive has declined. (Congress, of course, could punish the President for preventing prosecutions, via the impeachment power, but that’s hardly a substitute for real independence from the President of all or part of the prosecutorial power if that is what is desired. Or, for that matter, much of a remedy at all if more than 1/3 of the Senate is on board with the President's conduct.
Right, not hard at all, but apparently whoever wrote the Constitution was a fucking moron.
Strip it. I also started on the line of Congressional review (or pardons only activating on the consent of the Senate). But I concluded the entire power is out of place.
If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. Congress can annul sentences through law, no special pardon power needed. If a law is unfair or being applied unfairly, moreover, it should be fixed comprehensively.
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.
Biden abused pardon power. So has Trump. Both parties have good reason for passing an amendment through the Congress. This is probably in my top 3 Constitutional amendment we need in our time. (Multi-member Congressional seats, popular election of the President and changing “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” to “the President shall execute the laws of the United States.”)
Past few?
How about Ford pardoning Nixon? Or George H.W. Bush pardoning a bunch of Iran-Contra conspirators, thus covering his own ass?
And the prosecutors will ask who to prosecute.
Finally only fair justice!
I remain amazed at how, again and again, no matter how specific and unique an abuse by the Trump administration is, it is always, invariably, Really Joe Biden's Fault. Like, the frame has been adopted by the MAGA base, but also the cranky left. The media does it too. Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
Amen. Preach it, brother!
>No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
I don't know what the poster was referring to, but I AM mad at Biden for pardoning his family. It's a molehill of an issue compared to the current administration though.
another part is thankful that he is there as a proof that you can get to a high status and high relevance role in society and still mantain your humanity, your inner child alive, not being robotic and just have a blast doing whatever the f you want.
There is no point getting to the top if you then lose all your humanity and playfulness.
Like if the condition to become President were to become a robot like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, thanks no, I pass....Trump on the other hand is the best of both worlds.
I am getting Poe's Law'd … right?
He's sending people to concentration camps & bombing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. He's deported American children. Treatment of asylum seekers, treatment of immigrant's children, wanton discrimination against minority groups…
Humanity? Playfulness?
What the fuck?
TRUMP: Which one was that?
COLLINS: The founder of Binance
TRUMP: I believe we're talking about the same person, because I do pardon a lot of people. I don't know. He was recommended by a lot of people.
And I mean, wasn't the last Administration effectively Autopen? Yes, the President receives recommendations and tries to make the best judgement on those.
What would Biden's answer be for pardoning Fauci?
Rich drug dealers: Freedom.
Be a rich drug dealer.
Poor criminal: jail/death penalty/etc.
Rich criminal: freedom
CZ was pardoned for a single charge of failure to have an effective compliance program. No fraud, no victims, no criminal history. No money laundering.
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform.
Trump is a very twisted person, and this makes the US look bad, but the underlying crime was "compliance."
It's hard to count how many purely political and money-based pardons Trump has done this term, and there is essentially no pushback on his side.
Per wikipedia, Clinton's defense was that it was actually a favor to Israel, given Rich helping to finance their intel services. Maybe everybody else knew this, I didn't.
And just like the Great Leap Forward, America is well on its way to letting many thousands die from lack of healthcare.
Accelerationism is to a simulacrum as the thing being accelerated (society) is to the simulation thereof (our idea of society).
Accererationism is what accelerationism does. It disrupts the status quo, for good/bad/otherwise, and largely independently of our personal stance on the goodness, badness, and/or desirability of said disruption.
The current volatility in the market is one aspect of accelerationism, and it seems to be working, in that the markets are still open for trading; many are making out like bandits. Perhaps that volatility as a market opportunity is the point.
Whether or not banditry is occurring is left as an exercise to the reader.
Bad news: They are getting the kickback money.
I truly want to know of a better way to have discussions on a topic of this importance.
President Count
--------------------------------
Joe Biden ~8,064 |
Donald Trump ~237 |
Barack Obama ~1,927 |
George W. Bush ~200 |
Bill Clinton ~459 |
George H.W. Bush ~77 |Biden pardoned thousands of non-violent low-level marijuana convictions, which is why the numbers look like that. Trump pardoned a large number of violent protesters.
I don’t like trump. But “CZ” basically paid a ransom to let Binance come in from the cold. Why shouldn’t he pay another to get a clean slate and maybe go back to being CEO?
Instead of just commenting about being dismayed with the state of things, how about step back and speculate as to why he did this pardon, and what the implications of it are.
I don't know the answer to either, but I surely didn't learn much from what used to be an insightful, intelligent crowd
scrlk•8h ago