WASHINGTON — A governor who resigned amid a corruption scandal and served two stints in federal prison. A New York Republican who resigned from Congress after a tax fraud conviction and who made headlines for threatening to throw a reporter off a Capitol balcony over a question he didn't like. Reality TV stars convicted of cheating banks and evading taxes.
All were unlikely beneficiaries this week of pardons, with President Donald Trump flexing his executive power to bestow clemency on political allies, prominent public figures and others convicted of defrauding the public. The moves not only take aim at criminal cases once touted as just by the Justice Department but also come amid a continuing Trump administration erosion of public integrity guardrails, including the firing of the department's pardon attorney and the near-dismantling of a prosecution unit established to hold public officials accountable for abusing the public trust.
"He is using pardons to essentially override the verdicts of juries, to set aside the sentences that have been imposed by judges and to accomplish political objectives,'' said Liz Oyer, who was fired in March as the Justice Department's pardon attorney after she says she refused to endorse restoring the gun rights of actor Mel Gibson, a Trump supporter. ''That is very damaging and destructive to our system of justice.''
To be sure, other presidents have courted controversy with their clemency decisions. President Gerald Ford famously pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton pardoned fugitive financier Marc Rich just hours before the Democratic president left office. More recently, President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, sparing the younger Biden a possible prison sentence for federal felony gun and tax convictions and reversing his past promises not to use the extraordinary powers of the presidency for the benefit of his family.
But the pardons announced Wednesday are part of a pattern of clemency grants that began in Trump's first term and has continued in the current one in which bold-faced names, prominent supporters and defendants whose causes are championed by friends time and again have an edge on ordinary citizens who lack connections to the White House.
In 2020, for instance, he pardoned allies convicted in the Russia election interference investigation that shadowed his first term as well as his son-in-law's father, Charles Kushner, who was later named ambassador to France.
On his first day back in office, he pardoned, commuted the prison sentences or vowed to dismiss the cases of all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, using his clemency powers to undo the massive prosecution of the unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.
Twice indicted by the Justice Department, and entangled in criminal investigations in the White House and in his post-presidency life, Trump has long conveyed public suspicion about prosecutorial power and found common cause with politicians — including on the other side of the aisle — he sees as having been mistreated like he believes he was.
