Ed Martin, the chief pardon attorney in the Department of Justice, said that President Donald Trump's federal pardons could get Rudy Giuliani and others off the hook for state and local crimes related to the 2020 presidential election.
During a Monday interview on Steve Bannon's War Room program, Martin spoke to Trump's decision to grant what were thought to be largely symbolic pardons to Giuliani and 76 other people in connection with alleged ballot fraud crimes. Many of those receiving federal pardons were facing state crimes in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin for schemes to overturn the 2020 presidential election by using slates of fake electors.
"How does this go, because these are state charges, and you've got some pretty radical AGs, particularly in Arizona and some of these other states?" Bannon asked Martin.
"Couple things. One, there's a broad argument that the pardon can apply to state charges," Martin replied. "I leave to others for fighting it out, but there is in the history of the country, of course, you go back in time, at the very beginning, the charges a pardon operated against any crime against the United States, at the period early on, you're pardoning local charges too."
Martin admitted that courts were unlikely to drop state and local charges based on a federal pardon.
"But I'll just say this, if you charge somebody for forgery or obstruction of justice and the underlying crime ... the government says wasn't a crime, you take the wind out of the sails of the argument. What are you doing? And what becomes clear and should be clear is that they're doing this for politics."
A pardon, however, does not mean there "wasn't a crime," as Martin claimed.
According to the DOJ's website, "A pardon is an expression of the President's forgiveness and can be granted in recognition of the applicant's acceptance of responsibility for the crime."
Martin insisted that the local prosecutors who charged Trump allies "deserve to be named and shamed and held accountable in every way."
"It's truly, truly, the conduct is evil," he said. "I got to tell you, people argued for it internally, externally. And the president was like, we got to, like I say all the time. No MAGA left behind. We're not in a time where we could debate this."
