Pardon Me

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Dec. 6, 2025

A president’s constitutional power to offer clemency to prisoners, or soon-to-be prisoners, by way of pardon or commutation for federal crimes is absolute with the exception of impeachment. A pardon totally erases a conviction and immediately ends penalties associated with it and clears a person’s record of the offense or offenses. A commutation shortens a sentence but leaves the conviction intact.

That power is sometimes suspiciously used.

George H. W. Bush used the power to pardon six individuals from the Reagan administration for their roles in the Iran/Contra scandal—Google it.

Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive trying to avoid prison for convictions of tax fraud and racketeering. It likely helped considerably that his ex-wife raised significant sums for both the Democratic Party and the Clinton Presidential Center.

Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, who was serving 35 years for having given nearly 750,000 classified and otherwise sensitive documents to Wikileaks. She served seven years before her release. Joe Biden controversially pardoned his son Hunter in advance of him being charged or convicted of certain offenses.

But no president has ever used the presidential clemency powers to so reward friends and supporters as has Donald Trump. In fact, Ed Martin, the man the president appointed as his U.S. Pardon Attorney and Director of something called the Weaponization Working Group for the Department of Justice, has publicly declared, “No MAGA left behind.”

Trump has also appointed one of the people he pardoned as his “pardon czar.” Alice Marie Johnson was over-sentenced to life without parole in 1996 for a non-violent drug offense. Trump first commuted her sentence, then issued her a full pardon two years later. She has no experience with the legal system other than being its victim, so it’s not clear on what legal basis she makes her recommendations.

Trump started his blizzard of pardons on the first day of his second term when he issued full and unconditional pardons to the thugs who attacked and occupied the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overthrow Joe Biden’s victory.

You might recall the violence that occurred that day, the millions of dollars of damage done, and the fact more than 140 members of law enforcement were injured seriously enough they required medical attention. Five people died subsequent to that day—plus four police officers who, within days or months of responding to the attack, died by suicide—but Trump pardoned all of those who had been, or were about to be, prosecuted.

He recently also pardoned the 77 fake presidential electors from 2020 who were willing to illegally replace the rightful electors, and those who either tampered with voting machines or allowed others to do the same.

Unfortunately, there is so much more. For example, the next time this administration talks about their commitment to stopping the illegal drug trade, just know they are lying. Trump has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the disgraced former president of Honduras, who was convicted of conspiring to facilitate the importation of 400 tons of cocaine along with machine guns into the U.S. That’s 800,000 pounds of cocaine.

Trump, who tried to influence the Honduran elections, says he thinks Hernandez was “treated very harshly and unfairly.” Hard to be unfair to somebody who helped dump 800,000 pounds of cocaine onto American streets.

Then there’s Ross Ulbricht, the founder of a dark web site called Silk Road where people could buy and sell drugs, guns, other people, and pretty much anything else anonymously and pay using Bitcoins so it was difficult to identify sellers or buyers or trace transactions. The U.S. claimed Ulbricht made hundreds of millions from the endeavor, convicted him of drug trafficking and money laundering, and sentenced him to two consecutive life terms plus 40 years. But his mother, a major contributor to Libertarian causes, lobbied Trump hard. The president ultimately pardoned Ulbricht and called the prosecutors on the case “scum.”

Then there is Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, a very large cryptocurrency exchange. Zhao was sloppy, had few guardrails in place, and was convicted of money laundering and forced to resign as CEO of Binance, pay a $50 million fine (sounds like a lot, but Zhao is supposedly worth around $30 billion), and spend four months in the lowest security prison. Trump says he was a victim of a “Biden witch hunt,” though the DOJ investigation started during Trump’s first term. Not coincidentally, Zhao also assisted World Liberty Financial, which is run by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr.

He pardoned Todd and Julie Chrisley, reality television stars convicted of bank and tax fraud but vocal supporters of President Trump. Ms. Johnson says they deserved clemency because people called them “the Trumps of Georgia.”

There are many, many more examples but the short version is this administration has fully corrupted our already tainted system of pardons and commutations; money and ideology now mean far more than either innocence or fairness.