Amazing, yet not surprising the criminals Trump excused.
Philip Esformes beat the system. Or so it seemed.
Less than five years into a 20-year sentence for his role in a massive fraud scheme — bankrolling a highflying Miami Beach lifestyle of luxury cars, designer clothing and high-priced escorts — Esformes walked out of federal prison thanks to Donald Trump, who granted him clemency in the waning days of his presidency.
But Esformes’s reprieve is now in peril, thrust to the center of an extraordinary legal and political collision between two administrations pushing the bounds of executive authority. The Biden Justice Department is seeking to retry him — a move made possible because the jury that convicted him reached no verdict on six counts, including the most serious charge of conspiracy to commit health-care fraud. Because Trump’s clemency order was silent on those charges, prosecutors say they are able to take him back to court.
At stake is whether the government’s move to reprosecute the architect of one of the largest-ever health-care scams undermines Trump’s decision based on presidential powers laid out in the Constitution and historically considered the last word on a criminal conviction.
The highly unusual decision to retry a clemency recipient on hung charges has emerged as yet another flash point in the broader battle between the far right, which portrays the Justice Department as an arm of an out-of-control “deep state” opposed to anyone associated with Trump, and law-and-order proponents seeking to defend institutions of democracy against incursions by the former president and his allies. Experts say they know of no precedent for this dispute.
In recent months, House Republicans orchestrated a hearing portraying the case against Esformes as a political attack, while an array of Trump acolytes have taken to conservative airwaves and social media to denounce the Justice Department.
“In the annals of American history, no prosecutor has ever tried to reverse a presidential commutation in this manner,” co-wrote Matthew G. Whitaker, who briefly served as acting attorney general under Trump, in a Fox News column. “Does the DOJ have no sense of propriety at all?” tweeted Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican National Committee official from California, whose law firm has represented Trump.
But some former prosecutors say a retrial is a chance to correct a grievous mistake in which Trump bypassed long-standing protocols to grant clemency to a corrupt nursing home executive. If the Justice Department succeeds, Esformes could be sent back to prison, undoing Trump’s executive order that had made him a free man.
“It’s an opportunity for justice,” said Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor for 27 years who led the agency’s fraud section before it criminally charged Esformes. “We use the law to hold people accountable as best as we can.”
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Clemency is one of the most unfettered powers the Constitution confers on the presidency. The chief executive can offer mercy in the form of a commutation, which cuts short a federal sentence, or a pardon, which erases the civil consequences of criminal convictions.
Justice Department guidelines call for screening clemency requests through a formal petition process. Presidents from both parties have at times ignored those guidelines, but none in modern times as frequently or as brazenly as Trump, who largely used his expansive clemency power to benefit the wealthy and well connected; most of his 238 grants, including the one to Esformes, skirted the agency’s long-standing and onerous vetting process.
Yet Attorney General William P. Barr advocated for Esformes’s release, according to a previously unreported memo to Trump from three former top Justice Department officials lobbying on the health-care mogul’s behalf. Esformes’s commutation — issued while thousands of other inmates who had formally requested clemency were waiting for a decision — infuriated prosecutors who had worked for years to build the case and set the stage for a retrial, according to two people familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/13/trump-pardon-philip-esformes-biden-justice-department/?
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