I know Jesse Jackson and some others have suggested that President Obama should pardon Hillary Clinton before he leaves to spare her from another witch hunt by a Trump DOJ. I think this is a bad idea for many reasons.
The FBI has investigated twice and failed to find evidence that she committed a crime, which would have required them to find that she acted with the intent to distribute classified information or harm the United States. Even Comey, the Republican director who helped hand the election to Trump, said it “wasn’t a close case” regarding whether to charge her with a crime.
As we all know, Trump, caring little about the facts, promised during the campaign to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary. Now he is in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether to follow through on that promise and look like a petty sore winner and waste political capital on a bogus investigation, or abandon the promise and risk pissing his supporters off. Additionally, if he and/or the Republicans in Congress decide to keep pursuing this, it is time and political capital they don’t have to spend on passing bad laws.
The strongest argument for President Obama issuing a pardon is to spare a friend from further humiliation and partisan witch hunts that she doesn’t deserve. While I am not unsympathetic to that argument, I think that more harm will be done to her reputation if Obama does pardon her, because many people will interpret it as him protecting her because he knows she is guilty. Additionally, Jason Chaffetz has indicated that he intends to continue his witch hunt against her in the next Congress, and I don’t believe a presidential pardon would spare her from having to cooperate with that.
Assuming President Obama doesn’t pardon Hillary before he leaves, Trump and the Republicans will be forced to decide whether to keep investigating her and risk a backlash like they faced in 1998, or give up on it and risk alienating supporters. Given the way Republicans have treated him for the past 8 years, I see no reason the president should make their lives easier by taking the decision out of their hands and giving them more fodder to scream about the system being rigged. Let them deal with the mess they made.