You're wrong. Flat out. Completely.
I'm going to dumb this down to where even a child could understand it:
George Burdick (the case you and that other failure of intelligence keep quoting) was the editor of The New York Tribune, about the biggest paper there was at the time (circa 1915).
Now, somebody at the Treasury department was leaking information to The New York Tribune, and they were printing all of it. Think Watergate. It was essentially the same exact thing. And much like Nixon, it was driving President Woodrow Wilson insane...and making him look like the horses ass he was.
So Congress uses a subpoena to haul George Burdick into a hearing to find out who his source at the U.S. Treasury Department is. He refuses to say, takes the 5th, and that's that.
Woodrow Wilson, who was looking like a complete horses ass over all of this and much more, had the bright idea to "pardon" George Burdick. Now, at the time, no crime had been committed at all. Nobody had been charged with anything at all.
What President Wilson thought (and he was wrong) was that if he issued a blanket pardon to George for any and all crimes that
MIGHT have been committed, then it wouldn't be possible for him to incriminate himself, and he would be forced to testify in full and could no longer plead the 5th.
And President Wilson was
WRONG!
George told Woodrow Wilson to, in essence, shove his pardon up his ass. He wasn't going to accept the pardon because he had done nothing wrong, wasn't going to reveal his source as it was protected by the 1st ammendment and that was that...and he (George)
STILL wasn't going to testify.
So they issued a warrant for arrest against George for contempt. He was fined around 400 dollars if memory serves (a shit load of money back then) and jailed.
Then of course the appeal started and it
RAPIDLY went to the Supreme Court.
Now, the Supreme Court had two issues to decide:
- Can a person refuse a pardon?
- Can the president offer a pardon for a crime that doesn't actually exist and nobody has actually been charged with?
Well, SCOTUS being SCOTUS, they answered the first question but not the second.
The answer to the first question is simply this: If a person goes before the court, or the senate or congress, and wishes to have full pardon and be exempt from anything he/she may say, then he has to present that pardon to the body in question. If he doesn't, then that body can ignore the fact that the pardon exist at all.
What that means, in essence, is that a person must actually
CHOOSE to accept the pardon and then present it to the court in order to have it be valid.
That, of course, is something that good old George Burdick
NEVER DID.
And so he still refused to testify and told Woodrow Wilson to go fuck himself and told congress to go fuck themselves and he got away with it.
So now that you know your beloved case has
NOTHING to do
WHATSOEVER with Donald Trump, Jr. or his father, let it go. For fucks sake...I usually get paid for teaching.
