Donald Trump’s list of controversial pardons was scandalous long before this week, but the president’s abuses reached a new level over the last few days.
On Monday afternoon, for example, Trump pardoned former Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins, despite a jury verdict that the Virginia Republican accepted over $75,000 in bribes in exchange for deputy badges for wealthy local businessmen, who would use their status to get out of traffic tickets or carry concealed firearms.
The president claimed Jenkins was the victim of some kind of ill-defined partisan conspiracy, despite the fact that jurors heard testimony from, among others, undercover FBI agents who gave Jenkins envelopes filled with cash.
A day later, The New York Times reported fresh details surrounding Trump’s recent pardon for Florida health care executive Paul Walczak — whose clemency was already controversial — with the newspaper noting that the president unexpectedly intervened in Walczak’s case soon after his mother attended a $1-million-per-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
Hours after the Times published its striking report, the list managed to get even worse. NBC News reported:
President Donald Trump called two of the children of imprisoned reality television couple Todd and Julie Chrisley from the Oval Office on Tuesday, informing them of his plans to pardon their parents as soon as Wednesday. The pair, known for their roles on the TV show “Chrisley Knows Best,” sought pardons from Trump in February after they were convicted of bilking banks out of tens of millions of dollars in 2022, NBC News reported.
By all accounts, the evidence assembled by prosecutors was quite strong, and a jury in Georgia found the television personalities guilty of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud the United States following a weekslong federal trial.
It’s worth emphasizing that Trump’s pardon for the Chrisleys isn’t yet official, though NBC News confirmed that action from the White House is imminent.
If recent history is any guide, the president will justify his intervention in their cases by alleging that the celebrity tax cheats were targeted because they’re conservatives. In reality, there’s still no evidence of the Biden-era Justice Department prosecuting anyone as part of a partisan or ideological agenda, and making matters worse, the Chrisleys were first indicted when federal prosecutors brought evidence to a grand jury in 2019 — during the first term of the Trump administration.
But as the political world pauses to wonder who might be next on the president’s get-out-of-jail-free list, it’s hard not to marvel at the sheer brazenness of Trump’s gambit. In his first term, the president effectively wielded his pardon power as a corrupt weapon, rewarding loyalists, completing cover-ups, undermining federal law enforcement and doling out favors to the politically connected, but much of these actions transpired after his 2020 election defeat — when it seemed as if his political career was over and he no longer had to concern himself with consequences.
But as his second term gets underway, it appears Trump is no longer concerned about appearances or the pretense of propriety. He’s corrupting the pardon process; he knows that he’s corrupting the pardon process; he knows that we know that he’s corrupting the pardon process; and he’s doing it anyway.
The president seems eager to act with impunity, confident in the knowledge that a Republican-led Congress will shrug its shoulders with indifference; Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have already said Trump’s office effectively puts him above the law; evidence of corruption doesn’t seem to have an appreciable impact on his approval rating; and news organizations have to divide their coverage between this and a wide variety of other presidential abuses. The result is a dynamic in which Trump is effectively declaring, “I’m handing out pardons like party favors to my political allies, because they’re my political allies, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Traditionally, presidents have issued pardons to right a wrong or to protect those who have been falsely accused of wrongdoing. In 2025, if Trump sees a convicted criminal as an ally, that’s apparently all the president needs to know. For all the GOP hysterics during the Biden era about a “two-tiered” system of justice, it seems the White House has gone out of its way to create the very dynamic Republicans claimed to be against. 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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