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PARDON OUR GULLIBILITY, MR. PRESIDENT
In May – the springtime of hope, you might say – the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was considering a somewhat regal but still welcome grant of clemency to 250 people in celebration of the USA’s semiquincentennial on July 4th. The clemency might happen on June 14th (Trump’s birthday, a grant that would have appeared very imperial) or July 4th.
It didn’t happen in June. It didn’t happen in July. And indications are that – unless you have money, connections, or a case that makes political points for Trump – it ain’t gonna happen ever.
A few things did happen in July. On July 3rd came a Trumpian grant of pardons to 11 men, 10 of whom had been convicted of crimes related to the Clean Air Act. The 11th was Adam Kidan, a major Republican donor who had served about two and a half years for his role in a scheme to lie to banks in order to finance a casino boat company.
The Clean Air Act pardons benefited people who had sold or installed devices for diesel trucks that defeated their emissions controls, making them more efficient but far more polluting. Trump described the people on the list as having been persecuted by President Joe Biden’s administration for “fixing their car.”
The pardons included not just the people who had committed the Clean Air Act violations but pardons for six companies who were also convicted for the same offenses. The corporate pardons enabled the companies to erase millions of dollars in fines. Trump’s pardon of companies was the first expansion of executive clemency power to pardon companies in modern American history, a move Bloomberg Law described as “tracing back to England’s King Charles II.” The corporate clemency grants have wiped out almost $200 million in financial penalties, some of which were restitution.
But how about the rest of the 20,000-plus clemency petitions on file? President Trump told a swing at those, too, but not the way prisoners hoped. Last weekend, Trump quietly denied 5,607 commutation applications and 300 pardon applications from “people who mostly lacked political connections and had waited patiently in a queue while he awarded pardons and commutations to allies who had skipped the line,” as The New York Times described it.
The denials were announced inside the Dept of Justice in a letter dated July 14 from Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney, to U.S. attorneys across the country. The list is dated July 10, 2026, but was released publicly only on July 17, 2026.
Alice Marie Johnson, the White House pardon czar, said in a social media post in late May that she had asked several university clemency clinics “to submit candidates that deserve a second chance for consideration.” The Times reported that the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, run by law professor and clemency expert Mark Osler, submitted more than 15 applications in response. Four were in the batch of rejections issued this month. The remainders are still pending, along with thousands of others.
“It’s very discouraging,” Osler told the Times. “They’re not giving a fair shake to the people who have followed the rules, who have been leaders in prison, who have done all the programming they can, who have truly changed themselves for the better.”
Bloomberg Law, Trump Extends Pardons to Companies, Echoing a 17th Century King (July 19, 2026)
New York Times, Trump Rejected Nearly 6,000 Clemency Applications Amid Hope of Pardon Wave (July 20, 2026)
DOJ, Pardon Applications Denied by President Donald J. Trump on July 10, 2026
~ Thomas L. Root