Ben Wallace-Wells

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 1, 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 pardoned, then Kim Kardashian is 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.

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.

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.