Can Trump Pardon Traitors?
This post provides the backdrop for my next post, Can You See the Lying Russian Trolls Playing You for a Fool?
If you’re reading my blog for my work on Russian trolls, feel free to skip ahead to the next post. If you’d like more background on how I came to become interested in Russian info ops or you’d like to know more about Trump’s pardon powers, please read on.
So anyway, when I joined Twitter on July 15, 2017, the chatter at the time was about pardons. I turned my attention to that issue, tweeting first about whether President Trump can pardon in secret.
I also looked at whether President Trump can pardon for treason.
Our founders knew that a President who’s party to treason can be “impeached and prosecuted.” Tweet this.
Since I had been tweeting about pardons and treason, I searched in late July to see what other peeps had been tweeting on the same subject.
As an example, I tweeted this response to Andrew C. Laufer (who promptly blocked me — LOL so much for his claimed willingness to debate).
I also responded to @KBAndersen with a short thread that Stargazer jumped in on.
If I had been paying closer attention to what I found in my search results, I would have seen even sooner that Russia was still running a massive disinformation campaign on Twitter designed to undermine public faith in our democracy. For that story, read my next post, Can You See the Lying Russian Trolls Playing You for a Fool?
