President Donald Trump is taking an increasingly personal role in the government’s clemency process, wielding pardons with historic frequency to aid allies and advance his own political grievances.
The pardon actions have come so abruptly in certain cases that they surprised even some of those close to the president — such as a trio of recent clemency grants to a Democratic congressman, an executive charged by Trump’s own Justice Department and a former Honduran president convicted of drug-trafficking crimes.
Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people this year, including hundreds who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as a range of disgraced politicians, white-collar fraudsters and other well-connected figures.
The pace of those clemency grants to date has far exceeded any prior administration and has upended a system within the Justice Department that presidents relied on for decades to carefully vet applicants and deliver periodic pardon recommendations to the White House.
Instead, Trump and his top aides have established a far more ad hoc pipeline that frequently privileges those who share the president’s political beliefs or social circle — and who can make a direct case that they too were the target of a “weaponized” Biden administration, according to interviews with half a dozen people familiar with the pardon process.
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