It is not yet known whether a president can issue his or her own pardon, but if President Donald Trump changes his mind and does that, it will be "universally condemned, Sen. Rand Paul said Tuesday.
"If you read the constitution it's pretty wide open," the Kentucky senator told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "It's never been tested. I think it will be universally condemned if that were to happen."
On Monday, the president tweeted that he has the "absolute right" to pardon himself, but that he would nto take that step becasue he'd done nothing wrong.
"But we have a jockeying back and forth because we have a powerful prosecutor that's been enabled by this, and it's really why I've become very much opposed to the idea of special prosecutors really no matter which side we're on," said Paul. "If we do this after every election, we're going to become more like a banana republic that we're prosecuting the party that lost or won back and forth."
Instead, there are more important matters at stake, said Paul, including "whether or not we're at war in seven different places around the world and whether or not Congress should decide that versus a president."
Paul said he also thinks it would be a mistake if Trump moved to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, and he thinks Trump knows it would be a mistake as well.
"There are a lot of questions about whether or not you can be indicted, subpoenaed, forced to answer questions and there are arguments on both sides of the question for this," said the senator. "I think a lot of Americans have a bad taste in their mouth when they see the government going into your private attorney's office looking through all the papers, and the ramifications of that invasion of the attorney client privilege I think worries people."
Prosecutors also have "too much power throughout our system," said Paul. "There are a lot of people who disadvantaged by this, not just presidents but also minorities and people in poverty are being manipulated by a system where prosecutors have too much power."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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