That is exactly what I suspected, and lol, surprise.
One of the many anonymous leakers reported that the president was told that Don Jr and Kush could be in some hot water for their roles in this catastrophe, and his response was "If I can't get a pardon, then no one can." I really hope that's true, even though it smells of the media bating backstabbing that the administration is so notorious for.
Here's another nifty fact: Nowhere in the constitution does it say that the pardons must be announced. God knows how many people are planning to walk around with a pocketfull of secret pardons that they'll pull out if indicted or charged for a crime. And then that probably gets tried in the courts for god knows how long, all while the criminals may even keep on crimin'. Straight outta the Trump playbook.
I saw a legal scholar address the question of whether a tweet could constitute a pardon. She thought that it probably could, although, obviously, it's never been tested. I was sort of hoping that would happen, but then the Twitter ban happened instead. The president can pardon groups of people. It doesn't have to be named individuals. He could literally have tweeted, "All the beautiful Patriots at the Capitol are pardoned for insurrection" and it may have been so. The other side of that coin is that accepting a pardon constitutes of guilt, so that could be used against them on other court proceedings.
Yeah... apparently pardons absolve you of responsibility for a specific charge within a specific jurisdiction... however the recipient can still be tried and convicted for other factors related to the pardoned crime, and in other jurisdictions. I can't remember who, but someone like Flynn or Manafort - who Trump pardoned - is now back in court in NYC on the same charges, because the pardon doesn't "trickle down" to the lower courts...? or something? I forget the details of each of the rich old white men gaming the system with bottomless funding from dark sources... :(
You don't have to be charged with a crime to be pardoned for a crime. But you are basically agreeing that you have acted in an illegal way. Nixon, for example, was never charged. Another famous example of just blanket pardoning an entire group of people who engaged in many crimes was Lincoln's pardon of Confederate soldiers. It didn't include specific acts, but basically said that if you were an enlisted man, you're free and clear. I somewhat expected the president to do the same for the Capitol terrorists, but I don't think he will now. I think he will try to blame them as a way of saving his own skin. Pardoning them at this point would show that he's sympathetic. And we all know he will throw anyone, including Don Jr, under the bus to save his own skin. The state prosecutions for crimes that have been pardoned will get sticky, because I believe you can't be tried on state crimes that are indistinguishable from federal crimes for which you've already been tried. It's a special circumstance of double jeopardy. The state charge has to be different enough to not look like being tried twice for the same act. How a pardon might complicate that is well beyond my knowledge.