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The moment that Donald J. Trump’s presidency ended, a former prosecutor from the special counsel’s office in the Russia inquiry publicly unveiled an argument that Mr. Trump’s White House had erred in a wave of contentious pardons last month — leaving some recipients vulnerable to new prosecutions.
“If the Biden administration’s Department of Justice wants to rectify some of Trump’s abuse of the pardon power, there are now options at its disposal,” the former prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, wrote in an essay posted on the legal website Just Security just after noon.
Working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Weissmann led the prosecution of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman who gave internal polling data to a man identified by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a Russian spy and who never fully cooperated with investigators.
Mr. Weissmann argued on Wednesday that the wording of Mr. Trump’s pre-Christmas pardons was “oddly” drafted. The pardons narrowly covered the recipients’ convictions — rather than broadly relieving them of all potential liability for their actions.
Many of the recipients could be charged with more crimes than those for which they were convicted, he said.
For example, he noted, Mr. Manafort admitted as part of a plea deal over reduced charges that he was guilty of other crimes for which he was never convicted. They included 10 counts of financial crimes over which a jury in a Virginia trial had hung, and others offenses like witness tampering that had been laid out in an indictment in a District of Columbia case.
It would be “unusually simple” to bring new charges against him, Mr. Weissmann argued, in part because prosecutors could use Mr. Manafort’s sworn admissions of his guilt as evidence.
Mr. Weissmann observed that other pardons Mr. Trump granted just before Christmas, including to his longtime informal adviser and friend Roger J. Stone Jr., and to Philip Esformes — “the single largest health care fraudster in history” — were similarly narrow. (The texts of the pardons Mr. Trump issued on his last full day in office are not yet public.)
An exception, Mr. Weissmann wrote, was Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who was pardoned in November. That pardon was broadly worded to cover all of Mr. Flynn’s conduct — not just the offense to which he pleaded guilty.
Mr. Weissmann was a frequent target of Mr. Trump and his allies, who accused him of bias; in a memoir published last year, he said that his personal views had no bearing on the crimes that Russian operatives and Trump aides committed.
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