Bush's constitutionally dubious pardon of Toussie shuffle.

TPM:

The White House explained President Bush's Christmas Eve pardon withdrawal for Isaac Toussie as a simple matter of directing "the Pardon Attorney not to execute and deliver a Grant of Clemency." But a review of the relevant case law shows that the president may have just committed a major Constitutional foul:

Toussie Hired Former Top WH Lawyer

The pardon also threatened to embarrass Bush because Toussie bypassed normal procedures and took his case directly to the West Wing, hiring a former top lawyer in the White House counsel's office, Bradford Berenson, who had access to the president's most senior advisors.

And Josh Marshall from TPM shares his questionable tactics by Bush to a former Pardon Attorney for answers:

According to the White House press release from Wednesday, the president got to him before he'd done that and "directed the Pardon Attorney not to execute and deliver a Grant of Clemency to Mr. Toussie."

I spoke to former Pardon Attorney Margaret Colgate Love (1990-1997) who told me that "receiving the president's warrant and sending notifications to the petitioners is purely 'a ministerial act of notification.'" In layman's terms, at this end of the transaction, the Pardon Attorney's role is really just a matter of paperwork. "When we received the Master Warrant from the president," said Love, "what our job was was to notify them, by telephone, and eventually by written notification. The document evidenced the president's action. We never assumed that that document had any necessary legal significance."

So just as a factual matter, the idea that the Pardon Attorney needs to 'execute' the pardons seems to be bogus. End of story.