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TRUMP REPORTEDLY MULLING PARDON FRENZY
Since President Trump won the election in a landslide… er, make that “lost the election,” six weeks ago, requests for clemency have been flooding the White House from people looking to benefit from the presidential pardon power. CNN reported on Wednesday that the Administration staff have been “so inundated with requests for pardons or commutations that a spreadsheet has been created to keep track of the requests directed to Trump’s close aides.”
Trump is reportedly eager to engage on the subject – unlike his lack of interest in doing anything else, some report – and has been both reviewing case summaries and soliciting advice from his network of associates about whom he should pardon. CNN said, “Unlike practically any other matter related to the end of his presidency, his clemency powers are a topic Trump actually seems to enjoy discussing, one person in communication with the President said, even though it amounts to another tacit reminder that his tenure at the White House is nearly over.”
Trump is reportedly considering or being asked to pardon Edward Snowden, Joe Exotic, Ross Ulbrecht, Duncan Hunter and even his own organization’s chief financial officer. The New York Times reported that Rudy Gulliani has discussed a pardon for himself with the President, a report Gulliani vehemently denies. Other reports predict pardons for Trump’s family.
Meanwhile, judging from my own email on the subject, large numbers of federal inmates – whose clemency requests have languished in line with the 13,000 others at the Department of Justice Pardon Attorney’s office – are sending copies of their petitions directly to the White House, in a desperate bid to jump on board the Clemency Express. If there is an Express to begin with.
Axios reported last week that President Trump isn’t just accepting pardon requests “but blindly discussing them ‘like Christmas gifts’ to people who haven’t even asked, sources with direct knowledge of the conversations” have said. Trump reportedly told “one adviser he was going to pardon ‘every person who ever talked to me,’ suggesting an even larger pardon blitz to come.”
Axios said the president “been soliciting recipients, asking friends and advisers who they think he should pardon.” White House attorneys are said to be “working through a more traditional process, even if it doesn’t cover every person Trump has discussed, a source familiar with the process said.”
“We’ve been flooded with requests,” said a senior White House official, who admitted a lot of the appeals have been nakedly political and partisan, as is expected at the end of a presidency.
One Trump supporter lobbying on behalf of a prisoner said he realizes that Trump has his hands full and may not be receptive to this or other cases. “I’m a little worried that it might get crowded out,” he conceded.
The Daily Beast said, “It is unclear how much the outgoing president will end up delivering on these kinds of commutations and pardons, in large part because Trump is still consumed by pet grievances and his hopeless Rudy Giuliani-led legal effort to nullify Biden’s 2020 win.”
Walter Pavlo, writing in Forbes, put Trump’s wielding of the pardon power in perspective:
Pardons are all the rage these days but the system has been broken for years. President Trump, even if he pardons everyone in his administration, is still way behind other presidents who exercised their broad but constitutional power to pardon someone of a federal crime. Here are the facts, Trump has granted clemency/pardons to 44 people during the past four years… compare that to his predecessors;
Barack Obama: 1,927
George W. Bush: 200
Bill Clinton: 459
Pavlo notes that “What is most interesting about Trump’s pardons/clemencies are that they are highly political and they are motivated by emotion to right something that he views as a personal wrong that has been done.”
This suggests, sadly, that Ivan Inmate – unknown except to his family, the Bureau of Prisons and the court that sentenced him – can expect no more consideration from the White House than he’s gotten so far from the Pardon Attorney.
CNN, ‘It’s turned crazy’: Inside the scramble for Trump pardons (December 16, 2020)
Axios, Trump plots mass pardons, even to people not asking (December 8, 2020)
Daily Beast, Inside the Frantic Push to Get Trump to Pardon… Everyone (December 6, 2020)
Forbes, Trump And Pardons … Here’s A Case That Might Interest Him (December 11, 2020)
– Thomas L. Root
Ohio State law professor Doug Berman lamented in his Sentencing Law and Policy blog last week that “I am not really surprised that Prez Trump has entirely failed to deliver on his promise back in March to look at freeing elderly “totally nonviolent” offenders from federal prisons amid the pandemic. But I figure now is as good a time as any to highlight again that Prez Trump could and should, via just a stroke of a pen, bring clemency relief to the many, many federal prisoners who, like Roger Stone, are older, medically vulnerable and present no clear risk to public safety.”
