Pardoner-in-chief

The Justice Department website, Justice.gov, has a list of people that President Trump has granted clemency during the first year of his second term. It runs the gamut from the, if we're being honest, kind of funny. You can call me a messy bitch. I've been called worse, but I'll take it. Former Congressman George Santos in prison for wire fraud and identity theft to the genuinely unfortunate. This is Christopher Moynihan on January 6th. And this morning, nine months after receiving a pardon from President Trump for ransacking. the Capitol, he's back in custody, charged with threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. After January 6, Emily Hernandez ended up driving down I-44 drunk, she killed a mother. Hundreds of people on this list. A lot of fraud, a low cocaine, some tampering, a shoplifter. So is this Donald Trump's latest unprecedented, or is he really not that much worse than his predecessors? We're going to look into it. Ahead on Today Explained. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat, emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan, $15 dollars a month a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending, zero tears. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upbron payment of $45 for three months, $90 for $1.80 for $12-month plan required to $15.5.00% may slow when network is busy. See terms. Hey, I just Venmoed you for rent. Nice. Now I can instantly spend it whether I'm checking out online with Venmo or using a Venmo debit card. Say more. More exactly. Because the more you do with Venmo, the more you get. Like earning up to 5% cashback with Venmo stash on a bundle of brands. So, order more pizza. The math demands it. Get the Venmo debit card. Benmo Stasbundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms of Venmo.com. Me's dash term. Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bank Bank, N.A. I am the president of today explained. Closed in immense power. I'm Ben Wallace Wells, and I'm a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. Okay, so here we sit January of 2026, and this month alone, President Trump has issued some pardons. Who? Well, he has pardoned notably Wanda Vasquez Garcet, who's the former governor of Puerto Rico, who had been convicted of accepting bribes to appoint a particular financial regulator who a bank had chosen. Trump also pardoned the banker who was convicted of bribing her. He also pardoned the former FBI agent who was convicted of helping to set up the deal. He pardoned Adriana Camberos, who was a two-time fraudster. Trump had commuted her sentence at the end of his first term for a... separate crime in which she had made tens of millions of dollars selling fake five-hour energy drinks. And then eventually she got free on that commutation, and then a couple years later was convicted again for a completely separate fraud. And now she's being pardoned for that. Right now, the batch right now, aside from Vasquez Garcet, it's largely fraudsters like Camberos. It's largely white-collar people who often have donated a lot of money to an affiliated political committee or have a lawyer or advocate who's close to Trump. It's just sort of a grab bag of grifters.

We're like 12 months in. Do we know how many people he's granted clemency to this term? We do. It's a little bit more than 1,600, which is record-setting pace. The most significant population of that, though, are about 1,500 January 6th participants and schemers. And so, you know, beyond that, we do have a couple hundred, which is highly unusual still, but not quite as eye-catching a number. So 1,500 of them are J-Sixers, and then there's about another hundred, and they, what type of people are they? Well, we got a couple categories, I think. One is political... allies or politicians who might become allies. You know, maybe the most salient example there is Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for overseeing while in office an absolutely massive drug trafficking conspiracy. A Manhattan jury found Hernandez guilty of accepting millions of dollars in bribes to protect cocaine shipments bound for the United States. If you have some drug... dealers in your country and you're the president, you don't necessarily put the president in jail for 45 years. That was a Biden-inspired witch hunt. Trump. Let him go. There's the former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, a corrupt Democrat with phenomenal hair. You know, you may remember a real pompadour. I do. And he was let free in February. Rod Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 of trying to sell then-President Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. I didn't know him other than I believe he was on The Apprentice for a little while. He was just a very nice person. That's one category. You know, there's political allies and potential political allies. A second is just the rich, people who have committed just base white-collar fraud. In addition to Camberos, a guy named Trevor Milton, who is an electric truck entrepreneur, who is convicted of defrauding his own investors by effectively faking that his trucks worked when they didn't. He cut one video with them. in neutral, so rolling downhill, so it looked like they were actually driving. He is a huge Republican donor, and his pardon came roughly five months after he and his wife donated nearly $2 million to the Trump campaign. They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. He supported Trump. He liked Trump. I didn't know him, but he liked him. And maybe most significantly, a really important guy named Chang Peng Zhao, who is the founder and head of the crypto exchange Binance, the biggest crypto exchange in the world. He's one of, by Forbes's estimate, the 30 wealthiest people in the world. And he'd been convicted of effectively making it possible for people to launder money on his exchange, so a money laundering conviction. And significantly, he had just prior to his pardon.

conducted a massive deal where he underwrote Trump's family's crypto coin, which, you know, has been estimated as giving them a value of more than a billion dollars. So, you know, that's the second category, just like base white collar fraud, a fair amount of Medicare and Medicaid fraudsters in there. And then you also have some random famous people thrown in on the back end, like Darrell Strawberry, the former Mets. baseball star was convicted of tax evasion and later became an evangelical preacher. President Trump has gone to bat for Daryl Strawberry, pardoning the Mets legend for his tax evasion conviction from 30 years ago. And he said, you did some very bad things, but you know what? You have straightened your life out and you have given your life. back to helping other people. A real figure from my own childhood, six-foot-six, really elegant right fielder, and be a young boy, the rapper. So, you know, there's a grab bag, but there are still these kind of buckets you can identify. I am assuming, tell me if I'm wrong, that many of these people have money, many, if not all of them, have money. What is the process like for actually getting a pardon? How do you come to Trump's attention? There's not a formal process. But the Wall Street Journal, the political reporting website notice, others have documented a really extensive lobbying effort where lobbyists, people close to the president, are taking millions of dollars from the families and allies of people in prison to try to get their name before the president. And when you look at these individual cases and you go through the names that pop up who are involved in the lobbying, Roger Stone is involved in one. Chris Kies, the president's former defense lawyer, was also the defense lawyer for one of these figures. There's often some element of just straightforward money, like a lot of these people have donated to political committees associated with the president, but there's also some element of connection, you know. And I would say this is less remarked upon, but I would say there's also often a narrative element. You know, there is often something that might grab the president's attention. You know, he might be able to say, this person was charged just as I was by an overreach by the Biden administration. It was set up. by a lot of bad people, some of the same people that I had to deal with. Or it might, you know, illuminate some issue he wants to. You know, he pardoned a few people at the outset of his term who had been convicted of various crimes against abortion clinics, so anti-abortion protesters. So, you know, there's the straightforward money part of it, there's the connections part of it, and there's the narrative part of it. Does Trump ever talk about why he's pardoning specific people? I guess he does sometimes. You said January 6th is the obvious one, right? Yeah. But what does he get out of it? Like there's a sense that if he's pardoning people, they must be, I don't know, paying him directly. What is the deal? I mean, I guess I'd say a couple things. The first is like a lot of things with Trump. He sort of talks around it a lot without actually addressing why he's pardoning people a lot of the time. You know, when 60 Minutes asked him why he was pardoning Zhao, he said he didn't.

know anything about that case. Okay, are you ready? I don't know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that, and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. I think that one thing that is striking, and I think a real vulnerability for him, is that in a lot of cases, he doesn't give a real reason. What does he get out of it? You know, I think that... The way that Trump has operated in the second term, there's not a lot of legislation. He's leaned very heavily on things that he can make a kind of show of and do directly, you know, and that's executive orders and its deals made with foreign countries and universities. And the pardons feel to me very much of a piece with that. It's a place where he has enormous leverage and he can seem beneficent and he can do it without a lot of procedure. And that seems to me just like a very, very friends leader Trump realm of power exercise. Who is he not pardoning? Like, who's asked and has been told no? A bunch of white collar criminals. But notably, Sean Combs, the rapper Diddy, you know, convicted of sex trafficking crimes. Ghislaine Maxwell has been reported to be publicly preparing, there's a number of months ago, but she was reported to be publicly preparing a commutation application. And he sort of said, I'm not going to do that, you know. I have a lot of people have asked me for pardons. I call him Puff Daddy has asked me for a pardon. But she was convicted of child sex trafficking. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to have to take a look at it. I have to ask D.J. And I think that that is just a sign that there is some boundary here, that there are some cases that are just sort of too toxic. To be fair to Trump, the situation around pardons has felt... unprecedented for a while now. I remember when Biden was on his way out and pardoned some of his family members, Anthony Fauci, Mark Millie. There was criticism that, like, this has gone too far. Presidents are just willy-nilly issuing pardons, you know, to protect themselves on their way out. Do you think Trump is fundamentally changing the way? presidents will decide to issue pardons in the future. Like, have we hit a point here where it's like, I'm on my way out and anybody who I want to protect from the next administration, I'm going to pardon them? Or do you think this will get back to normal at some point? No, I don't know that this will get back to normal. I think that this is a kind of odd. I think you're very right to point out that this did not start with Trump. And there was real grossness at the end of the Clinton administration and the Biden administration. And this is also something that, you know, the Constitution explicitly allows, you know, is not really a murky area. The president Ken Barton, basically, whoever he wants, for whatever reason, the only check on him is politics.

Trump has preceded his whole presidency on a kind of assumption of impunity, you know, especially in the second term. And I think this is maybe an extreme example of what we'll see, but I don't. necessarily think this is going to stop. I suspect that presidents will keep finding it in their interests in discrete ways to let allies or contributors or people that might convey some political meaning for them off the hook and to waive their crimes away and to think either there will be no political consequence or I can take the hit. Benjamin Netanyahu Wallace Wells, he's with the New Yorker. Coming up, why on earth did the founding fathers give presidents this kind of power? Mama, let's research.

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Noelle King with Sy Krishna Prakash of UVA. He teaches law there. And his book came out last week. It's called The Presidential Pardon, the Short Clause with a long troubled history. He has great timing, Cy. Oh, I'm very grateful to President Trump for doing all the pardons he's issuing because it makes it quite likely that this will sell more than it otherwise would. He has not disappointed, right? He's just been incredibly aggressive with the pardon pen. The presidential pardon is written into the Constitution, which means the founders were thinking something when they did this. What were they thinking? So every system of government has some ability to mitigate punishments imposed on people for violating the law. And they do this for several reasons. One, it's often thought that standing laws are just too harsh. The punishments are too harsh. So they thought that they needed to have some means of modifying the sentence. They had also seen that, you know, in rebellions, a well-time pardon could nip the rebellion in the bud. It enables people to step back from what they're doing and stop doing it. And so it's a combination of this need to pacify rebellions, a sense that criminal punishments are too harsh, that we have a pardon power across not only American jurisdictions, but across the world. The framers were worried that any branch of government would have too much power. That's why we have three of them, right? No kings. We do a president. Did anyone at the time they were drafting the Constitution say, this is just given the president too much power? Many people made that exact complaint, Noel. They thought that if you look at the state constitutions, they have all kinds of constraints on the pardon power. Some crimes can't be... pardoned other crimes, you can suspend the sentence and the legislature has to decide. When you give a power to one person, it just makes it easier to exercise. And there's, you know, the Constitution doesn't impose any checks on its exercise. You don't need the Senate's consent. You don't need the House's consent. The courts can't review the merits of the pardon. And so a lot of people looked at this and said, this is just far too much power in one person. But the Constitution was an all-or-nothing question. And even if you thought this particular part of it was problematic, you voted on the entire thing up or down. And so if you liked the other things enough, you voted for it. All right, so which American president was the first to use the power of the pardon? Well, George Washington used it first. Oh. He was the first kind of, you know, it's not obvious because, you know, you don't have to give out a pardon if you're president. But he got applications and he, you know, he granted some of them and he was very cautious about it. He did a lot of research. He would talk to the judge. You would talk to the prosecutor. He would read the petition filed by the prisoner. And he would talk to other judges and he talked to... people in his cabinet, then he would reach a decision that, you know, reflected all that deliberation and caution. And his pardons actually mentioned the reasons why people were being pardoned, because he wanted people to know that he had reasons. It wasn't just, I like this person or I had a good meal yesterday and I feel happy. He wanted to, you know, make it clear that he had public policy reasons for what he was doing. All right. So walk me through some of the historical highlights, the big ones.

Some of the more, maybe more famous episodes was Andrew Johnson pardoning Confederates, including Jefferson Davis. This is immensely controversial because they had fought a bloody war against the United States, and so some wanted them to be punished, right, with the death penalty or worse. Johnson pardons them, and he's told... If you pardon these people, there's a greater chance that you will get the Democratic nomination for president. Now, he doesn't get the nomination, but it seems clear that he's using the pardon pen to help secure the nomination. You know, there's, of course, Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon. And by these presents do grant. A full free and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon. You know, Jimmy Carter pardoned all the draft Dodgers, and that was controversial because it was done, you know, very soon after the Vietnam War. I think that now is the time to heal our country after the Vietnam War. And I think that what the people are concerned about is not the pardon or the amnesty of those who evaded the draft, but whether or not our crime system is failed. And then, you know, that continues on into the last couple of administrations. So we can talk about that if you want to. Yeah, yeah, bring us into the present day. So with respect to President Clinton, he pardoned Mark Rich, who had contributed to his library, or more precisely his ex-wife had contributed to his library, and there was a claim that, you know, the Clinton thought about the donation in the context of whether to pardon Mark Rich. There were pardons of FALN terrorists. FALN was a group trying to secure Puerto Rican independence. The claim was that if Clinton pardoned them, a lot of people of Puerto Rican descent in New York would vote for Hillary Clinton. Hillary was running for the Senate, and President Clinton wanted to do everything in his power to help her campaign. And the same thing was said of Clinton's pardons of Hasidic Jews. And this caused a firestorm. He was investigated by the Justice Department after he left office, and he was investigated by both the House and the Senate. It kind of resurfaces in Trump one, right? Trump is president, and he starts paying a lot of attention to whether celebrities are seeking a pardon or whether they're trying to lobby for a pardon for someone else. He sees it as a way of getting a lot of good press. If you pardon someone that Kim Kardashian wants to have pardon, then Kim Kardashian's going to say nice things about you and her followers are going to think nice things about you. That was Trump one. I think the real politicization of the pardon power obviously begins with Biden and with Trump. Trump's second term.

All right, let's talk about President Biden because he took a lot of flack for pardoning his son Hunter and some others, including members of his family when he was on his way out the door. What did Biden do that was different or notable? So there's actually several pardons before that that are really interesting that people don't focus on. One is that Biden ran on a campaign of pardoning marijuana offenders. As I said when I ran for president. No one should be in jail just for using a possessing marijuana. And that's not controversial because many people don't have a problem with, you know, pardoning marijuana. They don't think it should be criminalized in the first instance. He also commuted a bunch of death penalty sentences, like I think more than 30 to life sentences. That's a little more controversial. But if you step back and think about what he was doing, most promises the president can make or make as a candidate cannot be kept because they require congressional action or the action of other people. This is a unilateral authority that he can always deliver on. And so imagine, you know, Trump saying tax penalties are too high. I'm going to pardon all tax penalties. Vote for me if, you know, the IRS is hounding you and I will relieve you when I come into office. Or someone else saying environmental penalties are too high, I'm going to pardon all the environmental fines. It opens up this possibility of campaign promises for pardons. And it also lets presidents just essentially undermine or nullify or vitiate statutes or policies reflected in statutes that they don't like. And that takes us to, you know, the Hunter Biden pardons and the pardons of other family members. You know, as you know, President Biden said for more than a year or two years that he would not pardon Hunter Biden. And I am satisfied that I'm not going to do anything. I said I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him. But after the election, when, you know, a pardon wouldn't affect his electoral future. in part because he, you know, declined to actually finish the campaign for presidency. He gave him a pardon. And he, you know, at that point he knew there would be no sort of fallout from it or very little fallout from it. And it was a remarkably broad pardon. It was 10 years for all offenses, violent or nonviolent. The final set of controversial pardons by Biden are all the people that were at odds with President Trump or who investigated President Trump. In the final hours of his presidency, President Biden pardoning multiple people. Those pardons include Dr. Anthony Fauci, the House Committee, that investigated the January 6th attack and retired general Mark Millie. And I was going to talk about the things that Joe did today with the pardons of people that were... very, very guilty of very bad crimes, like the unselect committee of political thugs. Some of the people, these people Trump had threatened to prosecute if he won re-election, and of course he did win re-election. And so Biden said, I don't think these people should be prosecuted. I think it's inappropriate to prosecute them, and I'm going to safeguard them. But the bigger question there is, well, are we now going to have every administration to end with pardons for...

ideological allies, including members of the president's administration. If we think about this in a broader sense, we can see that, you know, presidents are certainly part of the problem, but they're not the entire problem. Presidents, you know, reflect the partisanship that permeates our society. And people want their president to do things that reflect their partisan goals. And if you are a MAGA Republican, you think it's absolutely wonderful that January 6ers were freed because, as Trump says, they're patriots. And Trump knows that. And so he wants to ingratiate his base. And so it's not merely that we have presidents that are drunk on unilateralism. We have... parties that want their presidents to utilize their power in maximal ways in order to advance their party's interests.

Sy Krishna Perkosh's brand new book is The Presidential Pardom, The Short Clause, with a long troubled history. Today's show is produced by Abashai Artsy and edited by Jolie Meijer and Jenny Lawton. David Tatashore is our engineer. Andrea Lopez-Cruzzi. The rest of the team, Patrick Boyd, Bridger, Amina El Sadi, El Sadi, Amina El Sadi, Adi, El Sadi, Daniel Hewitt, Arianna, Dustin, Desoto, Kelly Wessinger, Peter Balinan-Rosin, Miranda, Estad Hernd, and Sean Ramosferam. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today explained is distributed by W. and the show is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network Podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odu.com slash vox. That's odio.o.com slash vox.