As Donald Trump prepared to leave the White House after his 2020 election defeat, the Republican threw caution to the wind when it came to pardons. Seemingly indifferent to norms, perceptions, propriety and the rule of law, the outgoing president handed out get-out-of-jail free cards like party favors to many of his most controversial friends, including Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and seven GOP members of Congress convicted of corruption, among others.
These were some of the most scandalous pardons in American history. Trump apparently didn’t care. Indeed, the thinking at the time was that he could act with relative impunity, unconcerned about a possible backlash. It’s not as if he’d ever face voters again, right?
More than four years later, the president isn’t just back in the White House, he’s also picking up where he left off, abusing his pardon power with reckless abandon.
On the first day of his second term, Trump issued roughly 1,500 pardons and commuted the sentences of 14 Jan. 6 criminals, including violent felons who were in prison for assaulting police officers. A few days later, he kept going, pardoning 23 anti-abortion-rights activists, seemingly unconcerned with their guilt. That was soon followed by a pardon for former Gov. Rob Blagojevich, a man synonymous with corruption in Illinois politics, whom Trump saw as any ally.
The hits just keep on coming. The New York Times reported:
President Trump has pardoned an imprisoned former Tennessee state senator who was two weeks into a 21-month sentence for his role in a campaign finance fraud scheme. Inmate records show that the former lawmaker, Brian Kelsey, a Republican, was released from a minimum-security satellite camp at FCI Ashland in Kentucky on Tuesday, the same day, his lawyer said, that he received a clemency letter from the president.
Federal prosecutors uncovered evidence suggesting that Kelsey illegally funneled money to his failed 2016 congressional campaign, and the year after his indictment, the Tennessee Republican pleaded guilty as part of an agreement with the Justice Department.
He later tried to change his plea — he made baseless but familiar claims about “weaponization” — but a court rejected the effort and sentenced him to nearly two years behind bars. Thanks to Trump, however, that sentence was reduced to two weeks, and the Tennessee Republican is a free man, his slate wiped clean.
Of course, the larger story isn’t just about Kelsey. On the contrary, it has become apparent to others that the president has created an entirely new legal/political dynamic, without precedent in the American tradition, in which pardons are available to perceived political allies with whom Trump sympathizes.
Sam Bankman-Fried is reportedly angling for a pardon. So is former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy. The New York Times reported last week that there’s a White House team in place focusing on “clemency grants that underscore the president’s own grievances,” and well-connected lawyers and lobbyists “have scrambled to take advantage.”
They have collected large fees from clemency seekers who would not be eligible for second chances under apolitical criteria that are intended to guide a Justice Department system for recommending mercy for those who have served their time or demonstrated remorse and a lower likelihood of recidivism. Instead, clemency petitioners are mostly circumventing that system, tailoring their pitches to the president by emphasizing their loyalty to him and echoing his claims of political persecution.
The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that among the many eager to take advantage of the new pardon landscape are “a rapper convicted in connection with a Malaysian embezzlement scheme, a reality-television-star couple found guilty of defrauding banks and evading taxes, and two Washington, D.C., police officers convicted after a chase that killed a young man.” The Times quoted Rachel Barkow, a professor at the New York University School of Law who has studied the use of presidential clemency. She said that while Trump’s first-term pardons were all about “cronyism and partisanship,” the potential for corruption is higher now “because they’re starting early, they have figured out how they want to set it up so that people have a pipeline to get to them.” Barkow added, “Like any sequel, it’s going to be worse.” Did I mention that Team Trump just ousted the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, as part of a broader political purge of federal law enforcement? Because that happened, too. The next time you hear presidential chest-thumping about “law and order” and “tough on crime,” keep this in mind.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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