Mmm. Liver.
I said, "blanket pardon". The very definition of a "blanket pardon" is no present charges are needed. That goes all the way back to Blackstone.
Let's back up a year and a minute. How many tourists were actually arrested on the day of Jan6?
Only 14!
Not many more by Jan20, and only one felony charge.
So the breadth of the tourists/offenses/eventual charges, was barely known by the time of the puppet-state installation.
Asking Trump to gamble on a "blanket pardon" that many -- literally hundreds -- of the Federal judiciary would have fought each other in the street to be the first to suspend/injunct/void the "blanket pardon" the next week if not the next day, is in retrospect unlikely to have prevailed, and instead would have been met with a two-headed counter-attack:
- The first attack from the Left would have been to challenge a "blanket pardon" for lack of a “specificity requirement,” or iow, failing to enumerate the offenses pardoned. This is the exact tack the Left leaked that they fully pre-planned to do if Trump "blanket pardoned" his family or anyone in his Administration before Jan20.
- The second attack would have been the #MSM ginning a #Narrative to draw parallels between Ford's pardon of Nixon ruining Ford's chances in 1976 (and it did) and making sure any "blanket pardon" tar-babied Trump in identical fashion (and it would have).