Frivolous lawsuit department:

A former Navy sailor who is one of five people to receive a pardon from President Donald Trump is planning to file a lawsuit against Obama administration officials, alleging that he was subject to unequal protection of the law.

Specifically, Kristian Saucier, who served a year in federal prison for taking photos of classified sections of the submarine on which he worked, argues that the same officials who meted out punishment to him for his actions chose to be lenient with Hillary Clinton in her use of a private email server and handling of classified information.

MO-OM IT’S NOT FAIR Jeffy stole two cookies and you punished me for burning the house down, IT’S NOT FAIR.… Read the rest

There may be a snag.

Trump took to Twitter on Monday to claim his “absolute right” to grant himself a presidential pardon, though he said it would be unnecessary as he has “done nothing wrong.” He cited “numerous legal scholars” to back his claim.

However, as Bloomberg reporter Steven Dennis pointed out, that wasn’t the case at the end of former President Richard Nixon’s time in office. “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the president cannot pardon himself,” the Department of Justice declared in 1974. The DOJ spelled it out just four days before Nixon resigned, explaining that the president’s pardoning power “does not extend to the president himself.”

At least some people are noticing.

The President openly declares he is above the law. This statement alone would have led to calls for impeachment in a previous era. https://t.co/dawuWli1t2

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) June 4, 2018

Republicans in Congress: This is dictator-like talk and your silence is absolutely deafening. Time to put the interests of the country above party. https://t.co/QRuiixyvCV

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) June 4, 2018

She’s our Rep by the way, Seattle’s own.

This is the part where the press needs to get every single congressional Republican—every last one—on the record about whether they believe the President can pardon himself (he can't) and what, precisely, they will do if he attempts it. https://t.co/IAu90j9LDt

— Susan Hennessey

Giuliani thinks Trump could shoot someone dead in the Oval Office but still not be prosecuted.

“In no case can he be subpoenaed or indicted,” Rudy Giuliani told HuffPost Sunday, claiming a president’s constitutional powers are that broad. “I don’t know how you can indict while he’s in office. No matter what it is.”

Giuliani said impeachment was the initial remedy for a president’s illegal behavior ― even in the extreme hypothetical case of Trump having shot former FBI Director James Comey to end the Russia investigation rather than just firing him.

“If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day,” Giuliani said. “Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him.”

Why … Read the rest

From Elizabeth Drew’s Washington Journal, which is her reporting on Watergate for The New Yorker – 416 pages of it plus an Afterword.

In April 1974 she had a long talk with one of Nixon’s aides.

The White House man also said that we are in a period of McCarthyism, of a “witch hunt.”

Drew told herself it was time to think carefully about what he said.

There is no question that great effort is expended to find misdeeds on the part of the Administration, but it is also apparent that there have been many misdeeds to find.

That of course applies to Trump too. Yes he is under a lot of scrutiny, but my god he has given … Read the rest

About that self-pardon thing…

Former US attorney Preet Bharara said Sunday that it “would be outrageous” for a sitting president to pardon himself, which President Donald Trump’s lawyers appear to argue in a letter sent to special counsel Robert Mueller.

“I think (if) the President decided he was going to pardon himself, I think that’s almost self-executing impeachment,” Bharara, a CNN legal analyst, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Whether or not there is a minor legal argument that some law professor somewhere in a legal journal can make that the President can pardon, that’s not what the framers could have intended. That’s not what the American people, I think, would be able to stand for.”

It’s not as … Read the rest

People Are Talking About one paragraph in a New Republic piece on the journalist Seymour Hersh.

To put it in a callow way, this stuff is cool. It’s also very masculine. Almost every person in Hersh’s memoir is a man—a sign of the time and the industry. But there’s an interesting moment that Hersh did not have to include. In 1974, he writes, Hersh heard that Nixon’s wife Pat was in hospital after being punched by her husband. It was not an isolated occasion. He did not report on the story, he told Nieman Foundation fellows in 1998, because it represented “a merging of private life and public life.” Nixon didn’t make policy decisions because of his bad