Trump Is Right on a Pardon of Netanyahu

It is typical of President Trump’s gumption to use his speech before the Knesset, as he did, to urge Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to pardon Prime Minister Netanhayu. “Hey, I have an idea, Mr. President,” Mr. Trump said off script. “Why don’t you give him a pardon?” He was talking about cases in which Mr. Netanyahu faces criminal charges. He went on to ask, in respect of the charges involving gifts of cigars and champagne, “Who the hell cares?”It’s not our intention here to belittle the issue of bribery, but this is one of those instances where we see the matter as a question of proportion. It’s a moment to warn against what these columns over a number of years have referred to as the American disease — “an infection of the democratic process by criminal law.” It can, we cautioned in one editorial six years ago, “bring down even the most heroic politicians. It may yet prove fatal to great nations.”Mr. Trump didn’t go into the particulars. That’s a job for editorial writers. Israel may not be a constitutional democracy like America, with a written parchment. We do know that the Framers of our own Constitution expected the pardon power to be used liberally, meaning it should be “as little as possible fettered or embarrassed.” We know this because of 74 Federalist and other records left by the Framers, including James Madison.We began to think about this issue in respect of Israel in 1977, when it surfaced that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his wife had two bank accounts in America. They’d been, we wrote at the time, opened legally when the future prime minister was Israel’s ambassador in Washington but, contra the law, the accounts weren’t closed within six months of Rabin’s return to Israel. Rabin quit, and Israel elected, in Menachem Begin, a rightist premier.In the cases now in the news, the virus of criminal prosecutions, as we’ve called it, has gone on for years, and Mr. Netanyahu, a leader who saved his nation, was called to testify in the middle of the war. Some of the cases against Mr. Netanyahu strike us as similar to relatively recent cases in America, such as McDonnell v. United States, in which the Supreme Court has been making it harder to prove bribery absent clear evidence of a quid quo pro.Doing favors for or giving gifts to a politician, our courts have begun ruling, doesn’t — and shouldn’t — in and of itself amount to bribery. Plus, one of the symptoms of the American disease is that the prosecutorial pursuit of a public figure can in and of itself become an abuse. Things can quickly get to a point where a president concludes that the only practical way out is a pardon. This happened with several of our presidents in recent years.President George H.W. Bush got so fed up with the abuse of power by an independent counsel, Judge Lawrence Walsh, that he pardoned six senior officials, including the secretary of war, Caspar Weinberger, in a fell swoop. In other instances, we supported the idea of a pardon for Secretary Hillary Clinton, President Biden, and Mr. Trump. What the American disease makes clear is that the lawfare can be worse than the underlying crime.No one knows this better than Mr. Trump, and he was right to address the pardon question when he spoke to the Knesset. The pardon power Israel gives to its president may lack the unfettered nature of the power vested in American presidents. A pardon in Israel requires a signature of a minister, and pardons are reviewable in court. In America, the power is the president’s alone and is absolute — a powerful antidote to a debilitating disease.

Trump Is Right on a Pardon of Netanyahu

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