WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s pardons of white-collar criminals who support his presidency and donate to his campaigns stoked plenty of outrage from Democrats and former law enforcement officials last week.
Now, even some Republicans are signaling their discomfort with his decisions to grant clemency ― and the way he’s going about it.
“I think that when the president pardons someone, they need to carefully explain why injustice was done,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told HuffPost. “And I think pardons should be rare, and President Trump likes pardons much more than I do.”
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In recent weeks, Trump has pardoned a former Virginia sheriff who was convicted of trying to sell deputy badges, a Las Vegas politician who stole money intended for a memorial dedicated to a fallen police officer, a tax cheat whose mother raised millions of dollars for Republican political campaigns, and a pair of reality television stars who were convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion.
The pardons appear to have been politically motivated, a reward for MAGA die-hards who stood with Trump and his movement.
“No MAGA left behind,” Ed Martin, the president’s controversial new pardon attorney, wrote in a social media post last month.
Trump also shocked many Republicans when he pardoned hundreds of Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol rioters who were convicted of assaulting or interfering with police officers, roughly 1,000 nonviolent offenders and around 200 people accused of assaulting police. A number of those pardoned have since been rearrested for other alleged crimes.
“On its face, you got to be pretty careful,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), another Senate Judiciary Committee member, said of Trump’s latest pardons. “I haven’t looked at the current ones, but I think I’m pretty well staked out on about two or three hundred of Jan. 6 people who never should have been pardoned.”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said the “best approach” for issuing pardons is to follow a process and make decisions on clemency requests after a recommendation from a parole board or the Department of Justice.
The president’s pardon power under the U.S. Constitution is broad and completely unchecked. Presidents aren’t bound to go through a certain process ― though some follow DOJ guidelines more than others ― and they’re free to pardon whomever, no matter the crime. Some of President Joe Biden’s pardons also drew outrage ― including for his son Hunter Biden.
“The only way you’re going to fix it or change it would be, I think, through a constitutional amendment, and that would take a long time to do,” Rounds said. “I think just the American people being aware of it is an important part of this discussion. I don’t know that you’re going to fix it as much as bring attention to it.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, dismissed a question about Trump’s pardons by pointing to controversial pardons issued by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
“There’s no sense of making any comments about the president’s pardons because it’s totally his own decision ― any president in the United States,” Grassley said. “And nobody asked me about the 2,500 pardons that [Bill] Clinton gave, and so I’m not going to make any comments on pardons that Trump makes.”
Trump, meanwhile, seems far more interested in probing his predecessor’s pardons. On Wednesday, the president directed his administration to investigate Biden’s actions as president, accusing his aides of concealing his “cognitive decline” and casting doubts on the legitimacy of his use of the autopen to sign pardons and other documents.
The order followed weeks of inquiries by Republican lawmakers into Biden’s mental and physical health as president following the release of a new book chronicling the former president’s “decline, its cover-up and his disastrous choice to run again.”
Biden, however, denied the accusations from Trump in a statement Wednesday: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”