Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.
In the first year of his first term, Trump granted a single pardon and commuted one sentence. He waited until his final day in office to issue around 140 additional acts of clemency. This term, he pardoned more than 1,500 people on his first day alone, and has since granted clemency to a further 87 people and companies.
The new approach—driven in part by Trump’s own experience as a criminal defendant, people close to him say—has spawned a pardon-shopping industry where lobbyists say their going rate is $1 million. Pardon-seekers have offered some lobbyists close to the president success fees of as much as $6 million if they can close the deal, according to people familiar with the offers.
A lobbying firm run by former Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller and former Trump Organization executive George Sorial was paid $1 million in the first quarter to lobby for a developer convicted of bribing former Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold bars. He hasn’t been pardoned. The firm declined to comment, and a spokesman for the developer said he terminated his relationship with the lobbying shop this spring.
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Administration officials and lobbyists describe two playbooks that have emerged. There is the official track, which involves pardon czar Alice Johnson, Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin and the White House Counsel’s Office. Applicants usually go through one of the three, and ultimately White House counsel Dave Warrington reviews the application and makes a recommendation to Trump. The two men meet every few weeks to discuss pardons, administration officials said.
The second track is riskier but can be much faster. If an applicant can find Trump at Mar-a-Lago or a White House event and ask for a pardon directly, Trump is often inclined to be helpful, administration officials said—particularly if someone says the magic words: “unjust persecution.”
Trump has often claimed that those he pardons were the victims of “witch hunts.”
Many of Trump’s most controversial pardons—including for Zhao and the Honduran ex-president—have gone through the latter track, which some senior administration officials said worried them. Another senior White House official said the “vast majority” of pardons have gone through the proper channels.
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