TO: All Personnel Whose Daily Movement Pattern Intersects the Relevant Radius FROM: Bureau of Geographic Immunity, Radial Compliance Division RE: Proposed Standard — Proximity-Indexed Clemency (PIC-1) CLASSIFICATION: Open for Comment
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the president told aides he would "pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval" before leaving office. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded that the Journal should learn to take a joke, however, the President's pardon power is absolute.
The Bureau notes that "however, the President's pardon power is absolute" is not the second half of a joke. It is a legal opinion. The Bureau is therefore treating the 200-foot figure as a sincere administrative proposal and has assigned it a provisional designation: Proximity-Indexed Clemency Standard 1, or PIC-1.
This memo addresses what PIC-1 would mean in operational terms.
1. The Unit
The Bureau begins with the measurement.
Two hundred feet is 60.96 metres. It is approximately two-thirds of an American football field. It is the length of eighteen standard doorways placed end to end. In the context of the West Wing of the White House, whose main structure measures approximately 82 feet wide by 168 feet long, a 200-foot radius drawn from the geometric centre of the Oval Office would encompass the entire building.
The Chief of Staff occupies a corner office with a fireplace on the first floor. The National Security Adviser occupies another corner office on the first floor. The Press Secretary has a first-floor office. Deputy Chiefs of Staff sit in alcoves adjacent to the Oval. The White House Counsel, the Director of the National Economic Council, and the directors of legislative affairs and domestic policy are on the second floor. The Director of Oval Office Operations manages the room itself.
All of these positions are inside the radius. The Cabinet Room is inside the radius. The Roosevelt Room is inside the radius. The radius is, in geometric terms, approximately the entire institution being administered.
This is either a very precise unit of clemency or a very expensive way to describe the staff directory.
BUREAU NOTE: The reader may wish to note that in every prior class-based presidential pardon — George Washington's Whiskey Rebellion proclamation in 1795, Jimmy Carter's Vietnam-era draft pardon in 1977, the blanket January 6 clemency granted to nearly 1,600 individuals on the first day of the current administration — the qualifying criterion was behavioral or temporal. The eligible class was defined by what its members had done, or when. The 200-foot standard introduces a third category: where they stood. The Bureau is not aware of a precedent in constitutional scholarship for immunity indexed to imperial measurement.
2. The Constitutional Architecture
The pardon power is granted by Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution: the president shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.
The clause does not specify that the recipient must be named. Courts have confirmed that pardons may be granted to unnamed classes of people whose identities the president cannot determine. The clause does not require that charges be pending — the Supreme Court has held that the pardon power may be exercised before prosecution begins, provided the underlying offense has already been committed.
What the clause does not address is whether "within 200 feet of the Oval Office" constitutes a legally cognizable category of person for clemency purposes. The Just Security legal journal has observed that a blanket pardon for a geographic class might face a specificity challenge — that is, the requirement to enumerate the offenses intended to be covered, not merely the population.
The administration's own response to the Journal usefully clarifies the institutional position: the pardon power is absolute. The Bureau notes that absolute and specific are not the same word.
3. The Variable Radius
The Bureau must also note that the 200-foot figure is not the only figure in circulation.
The Journal's reporting indicates that in an earlier meeting, the president quipped about pardoning anyone who had come within 10 feet. The radius, in other words, has ranged from 10 feet to 200 feet depending on the occasion.
Ten feet is the distance between two people having a normal conversation. Two hundred feet is the distance that encompasses an entire government building.
The Bureau does not presume to adjudicate which figure represents the operative administrative intent. The Bureau notes that a compliance standard whose primary parameter varies by a factor of twenty is a compliance standard in the early stages of development. The Bureau files this observation in the interest of institutional clarity and invites comment from the relevant staff within the applicable radius, or radii.
BUREAU NOTE: The administration has issued approximately 1,600 clemency grants since taking office, including a blanket pardon covering nearly every defendant charged with offenses related to January 6. The Bureau does not wish to suggest that the 200-foot standard would represent a departure from established practice. The Bureau merely observes that the prior grants defined their eligible classes by conduct. The proposed grant would define its eligible class by real estate.
4. The Joke That Isn't
The White House response to the Journal merits its own administrative category.
Press Secretary Leavitt's statement proceeds in two clauses: (a) the Journal should learn to take a joke, and (b) the President's pardon power is absolute. These two clauses cannot both be doing the same work. Clause (a) suggests the 200-foot remark is not a policy proposal. Clause (b) confirms that if it were a policy proposal, no legal obstacle would stand in its way.
The statement does not deny that the president made the remark. It does not deny that he has raised the subject of mass pardons with staff repeatedly. It does not deny that aides have told the Journal they believe he means it. It asserts, instead, that the remark is a joke and also that the underlying act described in the joke is constitutionally unreviewable.
The Bureau recognises this as a sophisticated administrative posture. The remark is a joke until the moment it becomes an executive action, at which point it becomes an unreviewable exercise of absolute constitutional authority. The transition from one to the other requires no notice, no filing period, and no comment window.
Staff within the radius are advised to plan accordingly.
5. Compliance Guidance
The Bureau offers the following provisional guidance for personnel seeking to assess their PIC-1 eligibility:
Confirm your daily movement pattern using publicly available West Wing schematics. Calculate your mean distance from the Oval Office centroid across a representative workday. If your mean distance is below 200 feet, you may have a claim. If your mean distance is above 200 feet, consider whether your role involves the Situation Room, the Cabinet Room, or any corridor connecting the main West Wing to the EEOB — the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is not technically part of the West Wing and which houses the majority of White House staff in a separate structure — meaning that the several thousand staff who work there are, under PIC-1, on their own.
The Bureau notes that the administration and the EEOB are separated by West Executive Drive — a closed driveway that runs between the two structures. Proximity to the Oval Office, as a legal criterion, terminates at a road.
The law, in this framework, has a street address.
BUREAU NOTE: In the medieval court, proximity to the sovereign was a function of favour, birth, and appointment. In the modern administrative state, it is a function of office assignment, West Wing square footage, and whether your role was important enough to warrant a first-floor desk. The Bureau notes that both systems produce the same outcome — immunity for those closest to power — but that only one of them calls it governance.
The Bureau of Geographic Immunity is a provisional sub-bureau of the Bureau of Public Agreement, established pending clarification of the applicable radius. Comments may be submitted in person, provided the submitter can confirm their position within the relevant measurement. Comments submitted from outside the radius will be reviewed at the Bureau's discretion, which is to say: eventually.
The Bureau of Public Agreement — operational since the invention of the moat.