according to this interesting article at The Atlantic:
www.theatlantic.com/…
Maybe he can’t pardon his fellow racketeers. Some interesting quotes from the article:
The power to grant “pardons and reprieves” includes the power to commute, or reduce, sentences after convictions. But this power is constrained by a limit: “except in cases of impeachment.”
the Constitution’s Framers were deeply concerned about presidents abusing power to protect co-conspirators. As just one example, regarding treason, the Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph voiced a concern at the Constitutional Convention that “the prerogative of pardon in these cases was too great a trust. The President may himself be guilty. The Traytors may be his own instruments.”
As even President Richard Nixon’s Office of Legal Counsel recognized, the Constitution does not allow a president to issue a self-pardon. These values point toward our reading of the pardon power, which limits the supposed prerogative of impeached presidents to pardon co-conspirators connected to their impeachment.
Read the whole thing!
I’m not a Kawnstitushanal Squalor, so i don’t have anything really substantive to add to their line of legal thinking. But as an asker of interesting questions, it would probably be worth asking, “Who would have standing to challenge Stone’s pardon in court?”
Put some fear into these rats, that’s the point. And you might even win the case by accident, putting the fear into future authoritarians.