We endorse the sentiment behind President-elect Donald Trump’s about-face on sending Hillary Clinton to jail.
Gone is the campaign talk of appointing a special prosecutor. The new line is right. “I want to move forward,” Trump said Tuesday. “I don’t want to move back. I don’t want to hurt the Clintons.”
We’re eager to be done with the Clinton scandals, even more eager to never write about the Clintons again. Their abuse of power was endless, mind-numbing and too often squalid.
But now it doesn’t much matter: The Clintons will never have power to abuse.
Yes, there’s an issue of the rule of law here. Remember Trump’s critics complaining that his special-prosecutor talk raised the specter of a politically driven persecution of political opponents? Well, presidents also aren’t supposed to order career prosecutors and FBI agents to ignore what they feel is compelling criminal evidence.
The best answer may still be what Seth Lipsky recommended in these pages recently: a pardon, from either President Obama or (if necessary) his successor.
Clear precedent exists: President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which allowed the nation to move beyond the “long national nightmare” of Watergate.
A presidential pardon need not require any admission of guilt, by the way: It’s one of the most extraordinary powers granted in the Constitution — and for circumstances just as unusual as this one.
The key point is that neither the United States nor its next president needs the new era to be burdened by old scandals, or the partisan warfare that litigating them would guarantee.
Trump’s magnanimity allows him, and the country, to move on to what’s really important — issues like the economy. He put Hillary Clinton out of work so he can concentrate on putting everyone else to work.
As some folks used to say, the nation’s business needs doing: Let’s move on.