Trump's Unbridled Pardons

 

"In the year leading up to the 2020 election, Trump tested his pardon power in a limited way on certain high-profile categories of miscreant—the politically corrupt, white-collar criminals, perpetrators of war crimes, and those caught up in the investigation into Trump's 2016 campaign. After the election, when Trump was no longer encumbered by the judgment of voters, the number of people pardoned ballooned; more than 84 percent of Trump's acts of clemency occurred in his final three months in office, according to the Pew Research Center.

 

In February 2020 Trump commuted the fourteen-year corruption sentence of Rod Blagojevich. The former Illinois governor, a Democrat, had served eight years for, among other crimes, trying to sell President Obama's vacated Senate seat. Trump didn't see what the big deal was. “That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence in my opinion and in the opinion of many others,”Trump told reporters. The same day, Trump pardoned Michael Milken. The face of Wall Street sleaze in the 1980s, Milken had pleaded guilty in 1990 to securities violations stemming from an insider-trading scheme. Two decades after paying a $600 million fine and serving twenty-two months in prison, Milken had his record wiped clean.

 

Then Trump waded into military affairs. He gave full pardons to several men accused of war crimes who had become right-wing causes célèbres. One had executed an unarmed suspected Taliban bomb maker, and another had fired on Afghan civilians, two of whom died. Trump also reversed the demotion of a Navy Seal who was accused of knifing a teenage prisoner; surrounded by fellow troops, he posed with the dead boy as if the body were a hunting trophy.

The following month, Trump pardoned almost everyone else caught up in the Mueller investigation, from those who had simply lied to investigators to those at the heart of the allegations of Russian collusion. The fears of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had come to pass. Trump appeared to be pardoning the “instruments”of his treason.

  Two days before Christmas, Trump pardoned his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, whom a jury had convicted of tax and bank fraud in one court and who had pleaded guilty to tax fraud and witness tampering in another." 

READ MORE IN THE ARTICLE BY JAKE BERNSTEIN