Prosecuting Trump will ruin our nation — and might not hold him accountable
by Andrew C. McCarthy, Opinion Contributor - 06/27/22 10:00 AM ET
One of the great acts of statesmanship in modern American history was President Gerald Ford’s pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, in the wake of Watergate a half-century ago. It is remembered as an act of clemency that was, for Ford, not merely selfless but self-destructive. In the short run, it was deeply unpopular as he struggled to get footing under his fledgling, unelected administration. In the longer term, so narrowly did he lose the 1976 election to President Jimmy Carter that it is impossible to say whether lingering resentment was the deciding factor.
Ford’s pardon of Nixon has lived better than it launched. It was initially misunderstood as shielding Nixon from accountability. Nixon was held accountable. He resigned because he otherwise would have been impeached by the House and almost surely convicted by the Senate. He was effectively ousted from office and, as a practical matter, the other penalty for impeachment, disqualification, was irrelevant. Despite Nixon’s historic landslide victory less than two years earlier (he won 49 states in the 1972 election), he left the White House almost universally condemned. It was inconceivable that he would ever have sought public office again.
The lesson of the pardon is that President Ford preserved domestic tranquility and insulated the Department of Justice from the deeply corrupting effects of immersion in partisan politics that a prosecution of Nixon would have made unavoidable. It is a lesson we have to hope President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have learned.
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https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3537622-prosecuting-trump-will-ruin-our-nation-and-might-not-hold-him-accountable/
