Ben Wallace-Wells

I'm Ben Wallace-Wells, and I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.

Well, he has pardoned notably Wanda Vasquez Garced, 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 is 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-Garced, 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 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.

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.

Trump let him go.

There's the former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, a corrupt Democrat with phenomenal hair, you know, who you may remember, a real pompadour.