Leave it to Donald Trump to turn the exercise of mercy into yet another demonstration of corruption. Trump pardoned or commuted sentences for 238 people during his time in the White House. ABC News now finds that at least 10 of them have since come under investigation or been charged with or convicted of a crime. That’s in stark contrast to former President Barack Obama’s 1,700 sentence commutations for federal drug offenders in 2014: By 2017, just three had reoffended.
The explanation for the high rate of recidivism among Trump’s pardons and commutations is that Trump, in typical Trump fashion, was offering clemency to personal allies and celebrities and people who sucked up to him. There’s a process: The Justice Department has an Office of the Pardon Attorney that exists to vet clemency applications and decide whether to pass them along to the president based on the merits. Trump predictably bypassed that, with just 25 of his 238 clemency actions having gone through that office.
"President Trump bypassed the formal and orderly Justice Department process in favor of an informal and fairly chaotic White House operation, relying in some cases on his personal views and in others on recommendations from people he knew or who gained access to him in various ways," Margaret Love, a former U.S. pardon attorney, told ABC News.
"So it might have been predicted," she added, "that some who made it through that lax gauntlet were going to get in trouble again."
Steve Bannon got a Trump pardon for his involvement in a scammy “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign. He’s now under investigation for that same fraud in New York state—and at the federal level, he has since been convicted of criminal contempt of Congress. The latter points to why Trump would have pardoned Bannon: He was at least peripherally involved in Trump’s coup attempt and he was too loyal, or saw his self-interest lying too much with Trump, to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. Trump allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, both of whom got pardons for lying to Congress and federal investigators, respectively, are both involved in investigations into Trump’s 2020-2021 coup attempt.
In a similar vein, Trump pardoned Republican operative Jesse Benton for a campaign finance violation—and last month, Benton was convicted of another campaign finance violation. This time, it was illegally funneling Russian money to Trump's 2016 campaign.
Ken Kurson, a buddy of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, didn’t commit political crimes. He was a stalker with three victims. Since his pardon, he pleaded guilty to two state-level misdemeanors—this charmer put spyware on his ex-wife’s computer. Another Trump clemency action that didn’t go to a Republican operative working on his behalf was all about celebrity. He commuted rapper Kodak Black’s sentence for lying on paperwork involved in buying guns; Black has since pleaded not guilty to felony drug charges.
Trump used his clemency power not to find people who had suffered from having inadequate legal counsel or as a result of harsh sentencing laws with disparate racial impacts, but to give his allies a free pass for crimes they committed in pushing his political interests. He didn’t offer mercy to the powerless, he offered it the well-connected and high-profile. He didn’t stop to think about merit or risk or following a process. The results are predictable. And it’s terribly sad, because so many people are stuck in federal prisons on ridiculously harsh sentences who should have a second chance and the freedom to try to build new lives for themselves. They deserved the mercy people like Bannon took as license to keep doing wrong.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
