Trump's Arpaio pardon could be used by Robert Mueller in his Russia investigation.

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

The Washington Post's report on Saturday that President Donald Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions about dropping the case against former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio offers a critical window into Trump's thinking. 

Trump's alleged conversation with Sessions and subsequent decision to pardon Arpaio could shed new light on Trump's motives when he spoke to former FBI director James Comey about ending the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn one day after Flynn resigned.

.........


Specifically, Trump's decision to pardon Arpaio is key to determining his intent when he had the February conversation with Comey about dropping the Russia investigation before ultimately firing Comey after he refused to do so, said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor.

According to Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June, Trump privately told Comey, who was spearheading the FBI's Russia probe at the time, he "hoped" Comey would "let this go," referring to the investigation.

Trump supporters and GOP lawmakers have made the argument that Trump was not  pressuring Comey to drop the case, but rather expressing his hope that it would be dropped.

But his conversation with Jeff Sessions, followed by his pardon of Arpaio, now suggests his intention of protecting those he considers allies at all cost.

"[Trump's] defense would be that he thought it was appropriate to end the Flynn investigation because it was meritless and that there was nothing wrong with him, as president, making that determination," Mariotti told Business Insider. 

But the president's decision to pardon Arpaio demonstrates that "this has become a pattern of activity where he tries to end investigations of his friends," he added. "Everything he said, did, and was told as to Arpaio is relevant to help us understand what he was thinking when he tried to end the Flynn investigation." 

Moreover, despite statements from his allies and administration officials who painted Trump's comments to Comey as musings and not a direct order, Arpaio's pardon suggests "that he was serious about ending investigations as to his friends" and it wasn't "just idle talk."

What's more it establishes a pattern of behavior, and THAT might be very helpful in establishing grounds for a charge of obstruction of justice.

So this just happened. Update!

NEWS: President Trump pardons former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, per @WhiteHouse statement. pic.twitter.com/Ro2IQhWfns

— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) August 26, 2017

Well this should certainly help put those charges that Trump is a racist Nazi sympathizer to rest.

Update: So Arpaio earlier this week called into Info Wars to thank Alex Jones for helping to convince Donald Trump to pardon him.

To be clear, this is the Commander-in-Chief giving a middle finger to the Constitution by pardoning a man who defied a judge's order, after he was convinced to do so by a renowned conspiracy theorist.

Trump's America is a terrifying place indeed.

Donald Trump is seriously considering pardoning Joe Arpaio.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

President Trump told Fox News he is “seriously considering” a pardon for Joe Arpaio, the controversial former sheriff of Maricopa Country, Ariz. 

Arpaio was found guilty of criminal contempt last month after he was ordered to stop racially profiling Latinos in his Maricopa County office. 

“I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio,” Trump told Fox News at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where he had been staying over the weekend. 

“He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him.”

First you fail to condemn violence by the White Supremacists and now you want to pardon the guy who got busted for racially profiling.

Is Trump in the middle of pledge week for his local KKK fraternity house or something.

What does he do next week, burn a cross on the White House lawn?

Let's end the day with President Obama's final turkey pardon.

Clearly the President just had no more fucks to give, and is having himself a blast these final weeks of his presidency.

You have to admit those were some bad puns.

But damn am I going to miss hearing them next year.

Jesse Jackson calls on President Obama to issue a blanket pardon to Hillary Clinton. Not because she is guilty but to keep the Republicans from hounding her.

Courtesy of the Detroit Free Press: 

Speaking at President Gerald Ford's alma mater, The Rev. Jesse Jackson called for President Obama to issue a blanket pardon to Hillary Clinton before he leaves office, just like Ford did for Richard Nixon. 

Stopping short of saying Clinton did anything wrong, Jackson told a large crowd of University of Michigan students, faculty and administrators gathered at daylong celebration of his career that Obama should short-circuit President-elect Donald Trump's promised attempt to prosecute Hillary Clinton for use of a private e-mail server.

"It would be a monumental moral mistake to pursue the indictment of Hillary Clinton," Jackson said.

"Hillary Clinton has not been tried, but there are those who want to drag her for the next three years. It will not stop until they find a reason to put her in jail. That would be a travesty."

Jackson used Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon as an example, but I left that out because Nixon was a fucking criminal and Hillary Clinton is not.

Which is why I think this would be a mistake, and that Obama will never do it.

I completely understand where Jackson is coming from, and that he really wants to protect Hillary, but it would instead destroy her legacy.

The conservatives are guaranteed to see this as the President admitting that Hillary Clinton was guilty, and that would give them cause for celebration and also provide political ammunition to use against the Democrats for decades to come.

Republican Rep. Jason Chavetz has already said that he is going to continue badgering Hillary so we know the Republicans will not end their vendetta against her.

But I also think that ultimately it will blow up in their faces.

I feel badly for Hillary, I really do. Nobody deserves this never ending barrage of false accusations.

But then again she is Hillary Clinton, and I have every confidence that perhaps more than anyone she will be able to weather this and in the end will be the one left standing.

President Obama expertly trolls the Republicans while performing the Thanksgiving traditional of pardoning two turkeys.

President Obama could not resist poking a little fun at the opposition while providing amnesty to Mac and Cheese, two potentially delicious undocumented main dishes.

Here is more from TPM: 

This year he used the official pardoning ceremony as an opportunity to comment on and poke fun at the conservative backlash over his recent executive actions on immigration. 

"I am here to announce what I'm sure will be the most talked about executive action this month," Obama said. "Today, I am taking an action fully within my legal authority, the same kind of action taken by Democrats and Republican presidents before me, to spare the lives of two turkeys, Mac and Cheese, from a terrible and delicious fate." 

"They'll get to live out the rest of their days respectively at a Virginia estate with 10,000 acres of roaming space,” Obama continued. “I know some will call this amnesty."

Stupid tradition, but at least the President makes the most of it. 

Alan Turing, WWII codebreaker and father of the computer, granted rare royal pardon for the crime of being a homosexual.

Courtesy of Reuters: 

Mathematician Alan Turing, who helped Britain win World War Two by cracking Nazi Germany's "unbreakable" Enigma code, was granted a rare royal pardon on Tuesday for a criminal conviction for homosexuality that led to his suicide. 

Turing's electromechanical machine, a forerunner of modern computers, unraveled the code used by German U-boats in the Atlantic. His work at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime codebreaking centre, was credited with shortening the war. 

However, he was stripped of his job and chemically castrated with injections of female hormones after being convicted of gross indecency in 1952 for having sex with a man. Homosexual sex was illegal in Britain until 1967. 

Turing killed himself in 1954, aged 41, with cyanide. 

Justice Minister Chris Grayling said the pardon from Queen Elizabeth would come into effect immediately and was a fitting tribute to "an exceptional man with a brilliant mind".

Without this great man we may have lost the war.

And without his contribution to modern day computing, I may not have been able to share this long overdue good news with all of you.

Remember when next you hear a conservative go on and on about the "good old days" that those old days were not good for everybody. And the times we are living in today are the ones that progressives have been fighting to drag  us to for decades.