President Trump might be right: He may be able to pardon himself, if it came to that in the special counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether Trump's campaign helped.
But it's a move he would probably regret. Legal and political experts warn that doing so would land somewhere on the spectrum of being very, very poorly received and political suicide.
It might even lead to impeachment. At the very least, it would hand Trump's critics an extraordinary real-world example to illustrate just how dangerous they think this president is to U.S. democracy. No president has pardoned himself before, and experts aren't even sure whether the courts would let it happen.
But even if Trump won that battle, the greater danger is how the pardon would be received. A president pardoning himself just doesn't sound right to some of the people who make a living thinking about the bounds of presidential.
“It smacks of royal authority,” Jens David Ohlin, vice dean of Cornell Law School, said in an interview about this last summer when Trump was reportedly first considering this. “If a president can pardon himself, he's basically saying, ‘Well, I'm above the law,’ and that sounds like the type of royal authority we rejected when we created America.”
Trump's critics are already on high alert for moves such as this to make their case that he should go. A half-dozen House Democrats introduced official articles of impeachment against Trump in November, in part asserting that he has undermined the judiciary.
Democratic leaders want nothing to do with impeachment talk, at least before the 2018 midterms, fearing that it would turn off moderate voters. But the case for impeaching Trump is strengthened if Democrats win back the House of Representatives in November. They don't have to worry as much about appearing to overstep bounds once the election is over. And it gets easier to argue to Americans that Trump should be impeached if he does something as unprecedented and drastic as pardoning himself for a crime.
Even some of his allies acknowledge the political danger in Trump pardoning himself. “If the president were to pardon himself, he’ll get impeached,” former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said Sunday on ABC News's “This Week.”
Trump argues that he could pardon himself but that it won't be necessary. He used that argument on Monday to again charge that the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III is a “Witch Hunt” against him. In other words, any charges against him would be moot because they came from a sham investigation.
But that is far from settled. While recent polls have found that a shrinking majority supports the Russia investigation, a majority of Americans still do.
It's likely that Trump's pardoning himself would come across as unethical to the majority of Americans who do support the investigation.
“No American is above the law,” ethics expert Melanie Sloan told The Fix last summer, explaining why a pardon like this would be unethical. “And if the president pardons himself, he's basically saying he's above the law, that he can commit crimes without consequences.”
Not helping Trump's argument that his pardon comes from a place of integrity are the pardons he has already handed out to other people.
Last week, he pardoned a conservative activist who had pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations, and Trump has floated pardoning other celebrities for crimes similar to what some of his former aides and personal lawyer are alleged to have committed.
One potential message the president might be sending to these guys: If you get charged with a crime and don’t drag me down with you, I can help you out.
That also smacks of a president trying to game the system. If Trump went through with pardoning those aides or himself, it could be the tripwire that persuades some Republicans in Congress to join Democrats and start impeachment proceedings.
A presidential self-pardon certainly isn't popular among some of those key Republicans. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday warned Trump against considering pardoning himself. Grassley also warned Trump earlier against firing his attorney general.
Trump doesn't have to be charged with a crime to be impeached. All he needs to get impeached is for a majority in Congress to agree that he has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” They can define those terms however they wish.
If Trump goes through with pardoning anyone related to the Russia investigation, especially himself, both Ohlin and Sloan think impeachment is a greater danger than any legal consequences.
“That's really the kind of risk that Trump faces,” Ohlin said, " is that he's going to come across as excessively corrupt in a way that will accelerate impeachment talks.”