Trump's New Pardon Spree

Yahoo

2 days ago

SINCE ISSUING A BLANKET PARDON affecting nearly 1,600 individuals convicted of crimes relating to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump has issued another 57 individual pardons.1 (The only presidents to issue more pardons were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served three full terms, and Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter, who both pardoned large numbers of draft evaders.) Among the recipients of Trump clemency actions, the most 'worthy' include government fraudsters, obsequious political loyalists, and financial benefactors. This was not how the Framers intended the pardon power to work.
Nor is it how pardons are assessed under prevailing Department of Justice guidelines, which require applicants to wait five years after completion of the underlying sentence before filing. The substantive criteria include acceptance of responsibility, engagement in community activities, the reasons for committing the crime, and a description of how a pardon will improve the applicant's life.
For the over 156,000 inmates in federal custody and thousands of others who have completed their sentences, meeting these metrics won't help much. To get a presidential pardon in this administration what matters is some combination of political access, a large amount of money, and a demonstrated commitment to political vengeance. According to the New York Times, Trump has installed 'a team of appointees . . . with a particular focus on clemency grants that underscore the president's own grievances about what he sees as the political weaponization of the justice system.'
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Last week, Trump pardoned Todd and Julie Chrisley, a reality-TV couple serving time for a $30 million conspiracy to defraud banks; their daughter appeared at the Republican National Convention last year and on Lara Trump's Fox News show. He pardoned Newsmax commentator Michael Grimm, a former member of Congress who once threatened to break a reporter in half 'like a boy' and throw another off a balcony at the U.S. Capitol, and who spent seven months in prison after a conviction for felony tax evasion. He pardoned former Virginia sheriff Scott Jenkins, calling him 'a victim of an overzealous Biden Department of Justice' and 'a wonderful person, who was persecuted by the Radical Left 'monsters,' and 'left for dead.'' In March, Jenkins was sentenced to prison for taking $75,000 in cash in exchange for giving law-enforcement badges to eight civilians—but, says Trump, he 'doesn't deserve to spend a single day in jail.'
Trump also commuted the sentence of Imaad Zuberi, a $900,000 donor to Trump's first inaugural committee who was convicted of falsifying records to conceal his work as a foreign agent and obstructing an investigation into the fund. He pardoned Paul Walczak, a former nursing-home executive who was sentenced in April to eighteen months in prison after he pleaded guilty to tax crimes involving the personal use of funds earmarked for employees. Walczak's mother, Elizabeth Fago, raised millions for the Trump campaign and was nominated to Trump's National Cancer Advisory Board. Walczak made note of Fago's donations on his pardon application, along with her efforts to hurt Joe Biden by making public the private diary of his daughter, Ashley Biden, an incident that prompted a DOJ investigation. Three weeks after Fago attended a $1 million dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon for her son.
Trump also commuted the life sentence imposed in 1998 on Larry Hoover, the founder of a criminal gang known as the Gangster Disciples, which was implicated in drug trafficking, money laundering, and even murder across 110 cities and 31 states. Meanwhile, for those keeping score, Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in an El Salvador prison despite a Supreme Court order directing that Trump facilitate his return to the United States. Abrego Garcia is too dangerous to be afforded basic due process or to re-enter the United States, Trump says, because of his supposed gang membership—but an actual convicted gang leader and murderer deserves a commutation.2
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LAST WEEK, REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-Md.) sent Trump's new pardon attorney, Ed Martin, a letter demanding an explanation of 'the criteria and process' now being used for vetting pardon applications:
Alas, it at least appears that you are using the Office of the Pardon Attorney to dole out pardons as favors to the President's loyal political followers and most generous donors, completely ignoring and abandoning the thousands of individual applications for clemency in the normal process. These Americans depend on your office for a fair shot at a second chance in a process that has some real integrity.
Although designed as a tool of mercy, the presidential pardon has always been ripe for abuse. At the constitutional convention in 1787, George Mason of Virginia voiced concern that a 'President could . . . frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself to stop inquiry and prevent detection, eventually establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.' Edmund Randolph, also a Virginia delegate, proposed an exception for treason, arguing that the pardon was otherwise 'too great a trust, that the President may himself be guilty, and that the Traytors may be his own instruments.'
Yet in his Trump v. U.S. ruling last year creating criminal immunity for presidents exercising 'core' and adjacent executive power, Chief Justice John Roberts highlighted the pardon power as 'conclusive' to the president and 'preclusive' of any oversight. In a concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett took issue with the suggestion that the taking of a bribe in exchange for an official presidential act should be immune from prosecutorial scrutiny, to which Roberts retorted that 'such second-guessing would 'threaten the independence or effectiveness of the Executive.''
The Supreme Court got it exactly backwards. It's the Court's endorsement of a culture of corruption—not accountability for criminal abuses of presidential power—that harms society. The Trump administration's trend toward pay-to-play government not only continues the culture of lawlessness that began during Trump's first term of office. It also will likely threaten national security, enable terrorism and organized crime, deepen inequality, and erode citizens' trust in government institutions.
In the case of Trump's pardon spree, we are witnessing a constitutional tool of mercy, one whose use the Supreme Court has put practically beyond question, being wielded as a tool for rewarding loyalty and creating 'an incentive structure to encourage people to take illegal actions' on the president's behalf. George Mason's fear that the pardon power could be abused and help 'destroy the republic' seems more plausible by the day.
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1
One figure in this corrupt mess of Trump pardons who deserves praise for moral clarity: Pamela Hemphill, the 'MAGA Granny' who pleaded guilty to a minor offense related to January 6th—unlawfully demonstrating—and served out her two-month prison sentence. She refused to accept Trump's pardon, and yesterday posted a letter from the Department of Justice acknowledging her refusal. 'How could you sleep at night taking a pardon when you know you were guilty?' she has said.
2
Hoover will remain behind bars, for now at least, since his murder conviction was on a state charge.