The louder ones were the first. On the same day that Donald Trump took possession as president of the United States for the second time, signed an order to pardon or commute the sentences of the almost 1,600 convicted or processed for participating in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But this week, the Republican has surprised again, adding suddenly 27 names to which he already reaches 70 in just a few months; And that if the massive pardon of the first day of his presidency is added, he is already the greatest in history. The previous record was also his: in his first term he pardoned or commuted penalties to 237 people, most in his last months in the White House.
The most recent beneficiaries of the president’s clemency powers make up an unsuspected group and include a sheriff Condemned by corruption, the leader of a Chicago gang that was serving life imprisonment for several different crimes or an ex -congressman for New York who had declared himself guilty of a crime of tax evasion. Apart from having firm convictions in justice for very varied crimes, the pardoned have in common to have expressed their political support to Trump, alleged, as the Republican himself, having been unjustly persecuted, or expressly asked for clemency in recent months.
Already on Monday Ed Martin, the recently appointed prosecutor of Indults who is a firm Trump ally and advocated forgiveness to the before he officially entered the government, gave a track of what was coming in the week. “No magician left behind,” he wrote on social networks.
Instead of following the long usual protocol of the Department of Justice, the President has used his constitutional power to grant pardons and strengthen or reward his followers or encourage loyalty within his administration. Trump even created a new position in this government: “Tsar of the pardons.” And appointed Alice Marie Johnson in that position, which she received a presidential forgiveness in 2020 and now she must recommend people to be pardoned by the president.
Profiles like Scott Jenkins, an old sheriff 53 -year -old Virginia who had been convicted last year of federal fraud and bribery. Elected as a sheriff of a northern state county in 2011, Jenkins was in office 12 years and in 2024 a jury declared him guilty of accepting more than $ 75,000 in exchange for appointing several auxiliary sheriff entrepreneurs, which gave them certain privileges such as avoiding traffic fines or being able to carry weapons without permission. In March this year, it was.
According to several reports, after his conviction, Jenkins directly appealed to the Trump administration asking for clemency. Clearly, his request has worked. Not only has he received an pardon, but on Monday in a publication in Truth Social, Trump defended Al, whom he called a “victim of excesses” of the Department of Justice during the presidency of Joe Biden. The president also criticized the judge who supervised the case, claiming that Jenkins prevented himself from presenting “evidence to support himself” and “silence” during the procedures.
Another very media case has been that of couple Julie and Todd Chrisley. After becoming famous for starring in a reality show On his life as successful real estate developers, in 2022 they were sentenced for tax fraud and evasion, and ordered to pay $ 17.8 million in restitutions. Julie received a sentence of seven years in prison and Todd of 12.
According to the judicial process, the couple bucked up to 30 million dollars for personal profit with tricks to receive bank loans. In their judgment memorandum, prosecutors said the Chrisley had participated in a “15 -year fraud streak.” But just a few years after having entered prison, Trump personally called the couple’s daughter, Savannah, who attended the 2024 republican convention and asked the then candidate for help, to warn him that he was signing pardon papers for his parents. In the few days that have passed since then, it has already been announced that a new reality of the family.
Among the pardons there are also violent criminals. , better known as King Larryis a leader of a Chicago gang that has been in prison complying with a life sentence since the 70s for the murder of a rival gang. He has received a sentence commutation this week, although not because of the murder, but for other positions that were added when in 1997 federal prosecutors accused him of continuing to operate from prison, finally condemning him for drug trafficking, among several other positions. His pardon this week does not fight it from life imprisonment, because that is for a state crime that the president has no power to cancel, but he will mean that he will leave the maximum security prison of Arizona, where he is held, to be transferred to another state prison in Illinois.
Trump has not forgotten political allies, such as Michael Grimm and Jeremy Hutchinson. Grimm is a republican former congressman who represented Staten Island and part of Brooklyn between 2011 and 2015, when he resigned after being accused of not reporting almost a million dollars in revenues and hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries of workers of a restaurant in Manhattan of the owner. He declared himself guilty and sentenced to eight months in jail and 200 hours of community service, among other punishments. Since then, he has supported President Trump openly and has now received a complete pardon.
Hutchinson, meanwhile, is a member of an important political family of Arkansas: son of Tim Hutchinson, former national senator, and nephew of Asa Hutchinson, former governor of the State, he himself was a state senator. In 2023 he had been sentenced to more than four years in prison for fiscal fraud and for accepting bribes. However, in the letter in which he requested the presidential pardon, his lawyers affirmed that “it is absolutely clear that the Democrats in the Department of Justice and within the chose to process the case because he was a high -profile conservative legislator of a republican family,” obviating the evidence they led to their conviction. Now, close to half of your conviction, you can leave jail without any criminal history.
The last wave of Indults of Trump are another example of how the presidential conventions are thundering and leading their own powers to the limit. It is not that what you have done is illegal, but it does break with the established. The Office of the Indult Prosecutor is usually directed by a career official, not by a politician elected for his adhesion to the President. And while sometimes the presidents do not resort to the office of the prosecutor of pardons in some cases, as Biden did when he pardoned members of his family, in the majority the Justice Department analyzes a series of criteria when studying a request for pardon, such as rehabilitation and repentance, although it is the president who decides if he continues his recommendation.
Apart from this week’s pardons, Trump had already forgiven people like Ross Ulbricht, founder of the illegal drug market on the Deep Web Silk Road; the former Democratic governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich, convicted of federal corruption positions; or three co -founders of the Bitmex cryptocurrency bag, which declared themselves guilty in 2022 of violations of the Bank Secret Law. And in the Trumpist world they begin to sound called so that the President Indulte A, the Minneapolis policeman who killed in 2020, and Tina Peters, an electoral official of Colorado condemned for allowing unauthorized access to electoral machines as part of a search for electoral fraud in the elections of that same year. Both are cases that have made battle flags of the president’s followers, who want the following forgives to be.
