Bush administration insiders are lining up for the one handout they’ll need most after their team is out of office: a presidential pardon.

More than 2,300 people applied for a pardon or commutation in fiscal 2008, which ended Sept. 30, the largest number for any single year since at least 1900, according to Justice Department Statistics…

Bush might even pre-emptively pardon his cronies before they’re charged with anything

Bush…has so far used his pardon power sparingly. He has approved 157 pardons and six commutations, the lowest number of any president since World War II, except for his father, George H.W. Bush, who approved 74 pardons and three commutations in his four years as president.

But Bush also never vetoed legislation until Democrats started writing it. Bush will likely pardon like there’s no tomorrow and might even pre-emptively pardon his cronies before they’re charged with anything. Since, after all, everybody knows what they did.

But legal scholars say there has been no comparable grant of amnesty for what would presumably be a large group of government officials for unspecified conduct…Though a blanket amnesty would forestall potential criminal cases, legal analysts said a pardon could be read as a tacit admission of guilt…

Unlike other controversial pardons, [Dean of the Chicago-Kent School of Law Harold] Krent said the extent of any potential illegal activity in the Bush Administration is not known. “We, as a society, lose the benefit from the closure and mere transparency that comes through a criminal trial,” he said.

Legal analysts agree that presidential pardons, originally meant as the court of last resort for innocent people unfairly imprisoned, have become a political tool.

“I think it’s an absolute disgrace the way Democratic and Republican administrations, the Bush Administration apparently being the worst, have departed from giving many commutations and pardons except in political cases,” said Phillip Heymann, a former Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton White House who now teaches at Harvard Law School…

“The Department of Justice has basically closed down the pardon program for all intents and purposes for meaningful release of ordinary people,” [Margaret Love, the U.S. Pardon Attorney from 1991 to 1997] said. “I don’t think any substantive thought is given to the issues raised by the people who are applying.”