The legal experts have varying opinions.
To me it’s not a legal question at all, but a practical one. The answer is obviously “no,” because no conviction removes him from office, no matter how serious the crime. If President Trump, for example, held a Black Mass and sacrificed a virgin to Satan on the White House lawn, and were then convicted of murder, Trump would still be President of the United States, in charge of the nuclear codes, the military, the CIA, the FBI, etc. It doesn’t matter if he were on death row – he’d still be running the executive branch, and for all practical purposes, the country.
(And you know that Republican senators are still going to say that he was convicted by Obama judges and refuse to impeach him, even as he sits in The Big House.)
That 25th Amendment ploy might be technically legal, but I can’t see how any president would attempt it. First, I am sure there are judges that would come up with legal justifications for ruling the pardon was not legal, though I think in the end the pardon would be upheld. But any vice-president that pardoned the president while acting president would be ending his political career. Gerald Ford came relatively close to being reelected after pardoning Nixon, but Nixon had resigned. Ford claimed that the pardon was simply meant to end the divisive controversy and allow the country to move past it. While some claim it was part of an agreement to get Nixon to resign, many believed Ford and I think most were happy to get past the whole thing. I myself was 6 years old when Nixon was pardoned so you can trust my recollections… But if a vice-president pardoned the president knowing he would reclaim the office, what would his justification be? The only way I see that plan being enacted is if the president and vice-president were both facing indictments and traded pardons. Though the Speaker of the House would be taking over almost immediately after as they would almost immediately be impeached and removed.
If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past 3 years from Comrade Mitch, it’s that it’s entirely possible for Congress to not give a shit about ethics, legality, or the Constitution as long as it’s “their” President. Trump and Pence could absolutely do what you just described and the current Senate would never convict.
Contrast that to 1974, when it’s highly probable that a lot, maybe even most of the Republicans would have voted to convict Nixon if he had stayed in office.
All ten Republican members of the House Judiciary committee said they would have voted to impeach Nixon if the vote had gone to the House floor.
All ten had opposed the article of impeachment in the committee vote, but after that came the appearance of the smoking gun tape.
Note that Trump has already done essentially the same thing that Nixon was caught doing on that tape. Nixon was going to use the CIA to block the FBI probe of Watergate. Trump was going to use the White House Counsel to block the Mueller probe.
(Not to mention that Trump would have repeated the infamous Saturday Night Massacre if anyone had actually followed his orders.)
The House was controlled by Democrats in 1974, and impeachment is just a simple majority vote, so the House Republicans would have just been voting for show.
The Senate was also controlled by the Democrats in 1974, but there were only 56-57 of them, so at least 10 Republican Senators would have had to cross over. The wiki article on the subject states that after the smoking gun tape came out, Goldwater told Nixon that he would only get 15 votes against conviction in the Senate.
Added to that is the reality that any President convicted of a federal crime also has the power to pardon the crime.
A president pardons a person, not a crime. If you are suggesting that a president can pardon himself, legal experts have varying opinions, but I believe more argue that he cannot, and I question the judgment of anyone who thinks a president *ought* to be able to pardon himself.
Whether or not a President can pardon himself, there is a perfectly acceptable Constitutional way for a President to be pardoned while in office. He can voluntarily step down as per the 25th Amendment, section three, at which point the acting president can pardon him. All he then needs to do next is to declare himself fit for office, and he’s good to go, still in office and completely pardoned.
There’s no possibility for legal debate on that one, because the process is spelled out literally in the Constitution.