Jared Kushner Convinced Trump Not To Pardon Himself

According to a new book, Jared Kushner extensively lobbied Donald Trump to NOT give himself a presidential pardon when he had the chance to do so, a move that Trump is likely regretting right now. Kushner's reasoning was actually pretty sound on this issue, as he allegedly was worried that the pardon could cause states to go after Trump even more vigorously. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains why Kushner may be right, and why a pardon wouldn't have done any good for Trump anyway.

Become a member today!

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Find our merchandise at Teespring

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

Follow more of our stories at

Subscribe to our podcast

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to Michael Wolff's upcoming book, Landslide, Jared Kushner was actually the one within the Trump White House who lobbied the then president to not give himself a presidential pardon. Although Kushner, who of course did manage to get a pardon for his own dad, but, he told Trump, no, this is not something you want to do. You do not want to give yourself a pardon. It's only gonna make things worse for you and believe it or not, Kushner's right. Because according to the book, Kushner was telling Donald Trump, if you pardon yourself, which you can only pardon yourself on the federal level and Kushner knew this. If you pardon yourself on the federal level, it's going to give these states more reason to go after you to think that you have something to hide. It could make these Democrat controlled states just off to the point where they decided to go after you just out of spite.

Whatever it is, you're not going to end up well if you give yourself this pardon, and again, he is 100% correct about that. But there's another thing and maybe it's mentioned more in depth in the actual book than as opposed to these excerpts that we keep getting. But I hope Kushner also explained to him that if you pardon yourself on the federal level, that effectively means nothing. All of the problems that Donald Trump is facing right now are not on the federal level. It's the state charges. It's the defamation lawsuits. It's the slander lawsuits. It's all of those other big legal issues that have been kicking around out there for many, many years at this point, some of them and a federal pardon would have done absolutely nothing to protect the former president from any of these issues, especially the ones in New York. It wouldn't have stopped the indictments. It wouldn't stop future indictments. He would still be just as liable for all of those potential things, even if he had pardoned himself.

So the pardon would have meant nothing, but yes, Kushner is right. It would've given people this new zeal to go after him. Because as we know, as the Supreme Court has said, accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt. And these states would want to know exactly what he was guilty of and believe you me, they would eventually find out. So this is one of those rare occurrences where even a broken clock is right twice a day, because Jared Kushner was absolutely correct about how bad it could be if Donald Trump pardoned himself. And another thing that I hope Kushner mentioned to him would be the optics of it. Because after all Donald Trump hasn't said whether or not he is going to run for office again in the future ever, and giving yourself a pardon and taking that admission of guilt as the US Supreme Court calls it. Yeah.

That's going to be a difficult albatross to carry with you when you go out there and campaign, that's going to be something people are going to ask you about, that's going to be something media outlets are going to ask you about. Like, hey, remember when you pardoned yourself? What exactly, what was that? What did you pardon yourself from? What did you do? You were impeached twice. We want to know what else you did, because that seems very relevant for American voters. So yeah, no matter which way you would have sliced it, a pardon would have been bad for Donald Trump.