Ryan Lucas

Thanks for having me.

Right.

Public corruption is obviously a big topic.

There are a lot of different aspects to it.

So I decided to focus on two things.

One of them is presidential pardons.

I went through all of President Trump's pardons since he returned to office a little more than a year ago.

And what I found is that he has pardoned at least 15 former elected officials and their co-conspirators who were either convicted of corruption or charged with corruption crimes.

And the one that really stuck out to me was a former Las Vegas councilwoman, Michelle Fiore.

She was convicted of pocketing $70,000 in donations meant to build memorials to police officers who were killed in the line of duty.

And instead, she spent that money on herself for things like cosmetic surgery, rent, her daughter's wedding.

Trump pardoned her weeks before she was going to be sentenced.

She is a Republican.

And in total, more than half of the pardons that I looked at were given to Republicans or Trump supporters.

Look, the president's pardon power is a core power.

It's rooted in the Constitution.

But I talked to Dan Greenberg about Trump's pardons.

Greenberg is a legal fellow at the Libertarian Cato Institute.

And he said every president makes mistakes in the pardon process from time to time.

He likened such mistakes to a hailstone out of a clear blue sky.