Martha Stewart, Please Refuse That Presidential Pardon

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/05/martha-stewart-presidential-pardon

Martha Stewart, Please Refuse That Presidential Pardon
This isn’t even about you, anyway.
by Kenzie Bryant
May 31, 2018 5:56 pm

snip//

Can a person even refuse a pardon? Yes, it turns out (though it’s not always as simple as saying, “No, thanks”). The Supreme Court decided back in 1833, that “a pardon is a deed, to the validity of which delivery is essential, and delivery is not complete without acceptance. It may then be rejected by the person to whom it is tendered, and if it be rejected, we have discovered no power in a court to force it on him.” So there’s that, Martha.

Whether or not she wants or needs the pardon is almost beside the point, though, because like most things Trump, this is probably about Trump—and not because the two media personalities have been friendly in the past. They had a public falling out in 2006, when Stewart was supposed to take over the The Apprentice, but said Trump refused to let her “fire” him. So instead there were two Apprentices airing at once (he “liked it too much,” she told Andy Cohen). After Stewart expressed displeasure with the setup, he published a letter that reads like one of his hate-tweets, but longer, saying, “Essentially, you made this firing up just as you made up your sell order of ImClone.”

He continued, “Your performance was terrible in that the show lacked mood, temperament, and just about everything a show needs for success. I knew it would fail as soon as I first saw it—and your low ratings bore me out.” The Stewart-hosted Apprentice, on which Bethenny Frankel was a contestant, was canceled after one season.

Stewart went on to endorse Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and went so far to say, “There is so much to know and so much to learn and so much diplomacy and kindness and introspection that goes with that kind of job. And it does not exist in the world of Donald Trump.”

Now, Stewart is top of mind for the president and it’s fairly transparent why. Most people believe that Stewart was imprisoned for insider trading, but she was tried and convicted for obstruction of justice after she made false statements to federal investigators during the probe into her insider trading—federal investigators including U.S. Attorney James Comey, the man Trump fired while he was investigating the president for his ties to Russian. Robert Mueller now has his own Trump investigation, and as the president’s friend and lawyer Rudy Giuliani told CNN recently while discussing about whether or not Trump should testify in said investigation, “Martha Stewart never would have gone to jail if she hadn’t gone and testified.”