With Jimmy Carter in the White House, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act, which made presidential papers government property – a law that Toobin reminds us “was central to the 2023 indictment of former president Donald Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office”.
In The Pardon, the bestselling legal author holds a master class on the controversial presidential power, focusing on Ford’s pardon of Nixon.
He shines a light on Benton Becker, a former federal prosecutor and friend of Ford whom Ford deployed to negotiate Nixon’s pardon.
Danielle Sassoon (the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York and formerly a clerk to the late supreme court justice Antonin Scalia) and Hagan Scotten (a federal prosecutor, Iraq war combat veteran and former clerk to justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts) made headlines with their resignations.
Most of the book, however, concerns events from a half-century ago: the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford, in the wake of Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal.
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