About a month ago, amid a flurry of bizarre and controversial pardons, Donald Trump announced a clemency decision that appeared to be especially important to him on a personal level: The president pardoned a large group of people who were involved in his effort to overturn the results of his 2020 presidential election defeat.
The list of beneficiaries read like a who’s who of figures from the Republican’s post-defeat inner circle: Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Boris Epshteyn, et al.
As a practical matter, the pardons were largely symbolic: Of the named beneficiaries, none were facing federal criminal charges related to the 2020 scheme. But what about the unnamed beneficiaries? Politico reported late last week that Trump “stretched the boundaries of the pardon power in unprecedented ways.” From the report:
The pardon’s language is so vague and limitless that it could apply to thousands of people. And now Trump’s Justice Department says it’s up to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Pardon Attorney Ed Martin to decide who, and which possible crimes, Trump actually meant to cover.
There’s no modern precedent — and maybe no historical precedent, either — for a president to delegate his pardon power to subordinates on a pardon this vaguely worded.
This might seem counterintuitive. When Americans think about presidential pardons and their merits, they tend to think of specific individuals who receive clemency from the White House.
But the incumbent president’s 2020 elections pardon was remarkably broad, applying to “all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities in, or advocacy for or of any slate of presidential electors … in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election.”
Who falls under this umbrella? Therein lies the point. No one seems to know for sure, though it will apparently fall to two sycophantic Trump supporters — the attorney general and the hyper-partisan U.S. pardon attorney — to figure it out.
“Pardon experts say this unusual delegation of pardon power is exacerbated by the vague language of the pardon itself, essentially leaving decisions about who’s covered to the judgment of Trump’s subordinates,” Politico’s report added.
Time will what becomes of these efforts, but it’s hard not to notice the irony of the circumstances. Trump has spent so much of the past year not only condemning Joe Biden on a personal level, but also specifically taking aim at the Democratic president’s pardons. To hear the Republican incumbent tell it, Biden was little more than an “autopen” president, pardoning people without knowing who would benefit from his clemency. It was the people around the Democrat, Trump has argued, who were making the real decisions about who’d receive the pardons. Indeed, many Republicans, including the incumbent president, have argued that their conspiracy theories about Biden should necessarily invalidate the Democrat’s pardons. And yet, Trump himself has now signed a pardon so broad that — you guessed it — he may have pardoned people without even knowing who specifically would benefit from that clemency. He’s leaving it to the people around him to make the real decisions, seemingly indifferent to the hypocrisy. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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