How Trump used his power of forgiveness



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One of Donald Trump’s last significant actions as president was to issue a series of pardons and commutations. With less than 12 hours in the White House, he has granted executive clemency to more than 140 people, including his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who was accused in 2020 of defrauding donors in the part of a private fundraising effort to build Trump’s United States. Mexican border wall. Trump also pardoned performers like rapper Lil Wayne and several former members of Congress.

[Related: Trump’s Pardons Have Been Sparse and Self-Serving — And That’s Without Even Pardoning His Kids]

So now that Trump’s presidency is officially over, how does he stack up against other presidents when it comes to his use of the power of forgiveness?

How Trump’s pardons stack up against other presidents | FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast

Trump will not go down in history as the most stingy president in this regard. But as the table below shows, he granted significantly fewer pardons (143) and commutations (94) than his predecessor, Barack Obama, according to Justice Department data. Ultimately, Trump was generally in line with other Republican presidents.

Trump’s forgiveness track record resembles that of other GOP presidents

Total pardons, commutations and other forms of clemency granted by each president during his mandate

President Sorry Switching Other Clemency
Carter 534 29 3 566
Reagan 393 13 0 406
HW Bush 74 3 0 77
Clinton 396 61 2 459
W. Bush 189 11 0 200
Obama 212 1,715 0 1927
Asset 143 94 0 237

“Other” includes forms of leniency that are less commonly used in the modern era, such as respites and remissions.

Source: Office of the US Pardon Attorney, press reports

It was unusual, however, for how late Trump’s last-minute leniency frenzy was. Most presidents use their pardoning power more liberally once their tenure is in sight, but nearly all of Trump’s commutations and pardons have been issued in the final months of his tenure. By the end of September 2020, Trump had granted 27 pardons and commuted 11 sentences. But in the following four months, he issued 116 pardons and commuted 83 sentences.

Most of Trump’s pardons came very late

Share of the total pardons, commutations and other pardons granted by each president during the last exercise of his presidency

FY President share of total pardon granted
nineteen eighty one Carter 14%

1989 Reagan 8

1993 HW Bush 49

2001 Clinton 56

2009 W Bush 19

2017 Obama 61

2021 Asset 84

Federal tax years run from October 1 to September 30, so this reflects the last four months of a presidency.

Source: Office of the US Pardon Attorney

Overall, however, Trump hasn’t really broken with his model of granting pardons and commutations to mostly wealthy, well-connected, and controversial people. In the final months of the presidency, he essentially quashed the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, pardoning five of the eight people who pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes as a result of Mueller’s work, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his former political adviser Roger Stone. And he has granted clemency to a number of other wealthy and highly controversial figures, including Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared, and four Blackwater guards who were convicted of the murder of 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007. .

[Trump Is Leaving Office With a Bunch of Legal Problems — And We’re Not Just Talking About Impeachment]

And in many cases, according to research by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, Trump bypassed the formal leniency review process and had a personal or political connection to the people he pardoned. This is not the way executive leniency is supposed to work, according to experts I spoke with in December. They told me that Trump’s use of the power of grace was not only extraordinarily self-serving, but could set dangerous precedents as well.

Trump ultimately did not push the limits as much as he could – in the end, he did not grant forgiveness to himself or his children, for example. But the assessment that Trump was parsimonious and selfish in his pardons is unlikely to be significantly altered by Trump’s latest round of pardons, even if it included more traditional candidates for executive leniency, such as those serving life sentences for drug or fraud charges whose cases have been defended by supporters of criminal justice reform. As several experts told me last month, Trump’s approach was mainly to grant leniency to people with the right connections – not to the ordinary people the power was supposed to help.

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