But the FBI inquiry will cease as soon as the pardon is issued. There’d be no reason to proceed—Clinton would be forgiven for whatever she did or might have done. Not to pardon her would risk another “long national nightmare” of I.G. reports, committee hearings, depositions, subpoenas, betrayals, media leaks, tell-all books, grand juries, and indictments. Bad press would dog her campaign. Republicans would benefit.

Not only would a pardon have legal consequences. It would have political ones. It would be a tacit endorsement of Clinton, a message to Biden not to run. Scrutiny of Clinton would fade. A few news outlets might continue to dig around—we at the Washington Free Beacon will never, ever stop—but most reporters, who’d rather not be writing about this scandal anyway, would turn elsewhere.

Obama would look magnanimous. The country would be spared years of Clinton drama it doesn’t want. A pardon would be a final display of Obama’s moral superiority to the woman he defeated long ago—exactly the sort of self-righteous gesture that most appeals to him. As David Geffen put it in 2007, “I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person.” Nobody believed that about Clinton’s wife, either. They still don’t.