‘I’m allowed to do a self-pardon’: Trump opens the door to pardons for staff and himself
‘I’m allowed to do a self-pardon’: Trump opens the door to pardons for staff and himself
Steve Benen Fri, October 16, 2026 at 4:54 PM UTC
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(Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)
A couple of months ago, Donald Trump appeared on a conservative radio show and said that “a lot of people” wanted to see the president pardon himself in his first term.
“I had the absolute right to do it,” he said. “Instead, I fought it through the courts and won.”
While that wasn’t an entirely accurate summary of recent history — Trump, who was convicted of several felonies in New York, only “won” when the federal criminal cases against him ended upon his return to the White House, not because they were adjudicated in his favor — the president’s rhetoric about his “absolute right” to pardon himself stood out.
This week, he returned to the issue during an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty.
Asked specifically whether he’s “seriously considering a self-pardon” before he leaves office, the president initially hedged, saying he’s done “nothing wrong,” before adding, “I’m allowed to do a self-pardon. I’m allowed to pardon. … The pardon is very powerful. I know that. They say it’s the most powerful thing a president has, the power of pardon.”
As my MS NOW colleague Jordan Rubin explained in detail just last week, whether presidents can actually pardon themselves is a matter of some controversy. Ahead of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a memo concluding that presidents can’t pardon themselves, though OLC opinions are not binding on the courts, and the matter has never been tested — at least not yet.
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But also of interest was the other point Trump made as part of the same exchange.
On the topic of pardons, the Republican went on to say, “I can tell you this, I don’t want to see my people go through — because these people are lunatics on the, on the left — I don’t want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”
This came a few weeks after Trump also told Time magazine that he’s prepared to issue pardons to members of his administration.
Time will tell whether he follows through, and just as notably, just how many members of his team are considered for presidential clemency. But that Trump keeps making comments like these might very have a real impact in the White House and throughout the executive branch: The president is effectively letting a small army of political appointees know that, no matter what they do as part of their duties, he’s inclined to hand them a pardon, whether or not they deserve one.
Systemic government corruption is already a problem in the Trump era. The signal he’s sending to his team is likely to make matters worse.
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Source: “AOL General News”
