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250 PARDONS BY JULY 4TH?
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that White House officials are considering a plan for President Trump to issue 250 pardons in the next several months in commemoration of the USA’s 250th birthday (nominally July 4, 2026, although argument can be made for other dates).
The plan is still reportedly in preliminary discussions, and no one has said that the action would be solely pardon (the forgiveness of a conviction) as opposed to commutation of sentence (reduction or elimination of imprisonment, fine or restitution without wiping out the underlying conviction).
Trump, himself a convicted felon (although still on appeal in New York state court), has granted clemency more than 2,000 times in his last term and so far this term. The number is only half of the clemencies granted by President Biden, who commuted the sentences of people home on the CARES Act after the incoming Trump Administration signaled that those people would be returned to prison, pardoned people convicted of marijuana possession offenses in the past (none of whom was in prison when the pardon issued), and commuted death sentences of 38 of the 40 people on federal death row (changing the sentences to life in prison without chance of release).
Trump’s clemencies, although fewer in number than Biden’s, have been more controversial. Biden caught flak for pardoning his son and his family. But Trump’s outright pardon on Inauguration Day of 1,500 January 6th rioters, followed by pardons of people connected to his movement or related to wealthy donors to his campaign, have “garnered criticism from both sides of the aisle and encouraged some high-profile candidates to openly campaign to have their convictions or alleged crimes wiped away with a signature,” the Wall Street Journal said.
Trump’s clemency policies, not to mention his appointment of Alice Marie Johnson as White House clemency czar, have resulted in a land rush of clemency petitions. About 5,100 petitions were filed in 2024. The next year, more than three times as many (about 16,150) came in.
The Dept of Justice Office of Pardon Attorney no longer reports the number of petitions currently pending. At the end of March last year, the last data available, over 10,000 petitions were pending, and that was before an additional 13,000 were received.
Meanwhile, anonymously sourced rumors abound. One is that some in the White House worry about announcing any clemency before the November midterm elections. Others predict that Trump could announce 250 “acts of mercy” on June 14, which is both Flag Day and his birthday, or on July 4. One White House official said there are always ongoing discussions about how to carry out Trump’s priorities, but no decision has been made.
St. Thomas School of Law Professor Mark Osler, a federal clemency expert, “has watched with increasing frustration as his clients’ petitions go unanswered. He described the pardon attorney as ‘a zombie office, in the sense that they’re assigning numbers to cases that come in, but it’s not clear that anything’s happening beyond that’,” according to a New Yorker article published a few weeks ago.
“Rather than receiving good or bad news for clients, Osler said, ‘you simply don’t hear. There’s no up, and there’s no down. And so, when they call from prison, or they write, I have to tell them it’s pending. But really, that means it’s being ignored’.”
Osler said that the clemencies that bother him the most are those “that have gone to the people who are fabulously wealthy. These are the people who have been advantaged by so much. With my students, we’ve told the stories of people who are fabulously poor and are being ignored.”
Wall Street Journal, White House Explores 250 Pardons to Mark America’s 250th Birthday (May 13, 2026)
Dept of Justice, Office of Pardon Attorney (May 17, 2026)
New Yorker, Donald Trump’s Pardon Economy (April 27, 2026)
~ Thomas L. Root