Chapter 1: What pardons has President Trump issued during his second term?
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 imprisoned 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 6th, Emily Hernandez ended up driving down I-44 drunk. She killed a mother. Hundreds of people on this list. A lot of fraud, a little 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.
Today Explained.
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?
Who?
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Chapter 2: Who are some notable individuals granted clemency by Trump?
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 Kyes, 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. 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.
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Chapter 3: How many people has Trump granted clemency to this term?
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Chapter 4: What categories of individuals are receiving pardons from Trump?
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Noelle King with Sai 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, Sai.
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-timed 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 giving the president too much power?
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