The Presidential Pardon thing doesn’t make much sense. If I’m not mistaken, America has a bunch of different courts. If you don’t like the result of a jury’s verdict, the lawyer complains, stomps his feet and takes the case to a higher court. If the client has enough money, the attorney will happily cash the checks and keep pushing it all the way to the Supreme Court.
If I understand it correctly, a pardon by the President of the United States sets aside the punishment for a federal crime. It could also offer clemency, the commutation of a sentence, remission of fines, restitution or a reprieve. A pardon is an act of forgiveness and recognition of the applicant’s acceptance of responsibility for the crime and established good conduct for a significant period of time after conviction or completion of sentence.
It does sound sort of nice. You have to wonder though—if you’re pardoning 70-plus people like outgoing President Donald Trump just did, how could you truly know anything about the folks that are getting pardons—unless that’s not the point? Not to be naive, but pardons seem to be forms of payback or hopes of gaining something in the future—on the part of the pardoner. Also, you’d think a departing President would have more pressing matters to take care of rather than pardoning corrupt politicians.
It’s kind of ironic that Trump, the self-described “law and order” guy, just pardoned a lot of corrupt politicians and criminals. Here’s a partial list of the cast of characters who received pardons:
The rapper Lil Wayne received a pardon after pleading guilty to a gun possession charge in Miami. Another rapper, Kodak Black, received a commutation after he pleaded guilty to a weapons charge.
A commutation for Sholam Weiss, who is believed to be serving the longest white-collar sentence in U.S. history, 835 years, for money laundering and other charges stemming from the failure of the National Heritage Life Insurance Co. He fled while on bail and partied with prostitutes at a luxury hotel before the authorities tracked him down in Austria. “He regrets doing that,” Weiss’s nephew, Hershy Marton, said in an interview in December.
A pardon for Steve Bannon, who was among a group of four Trump supporters accused last year of using money donated to the supposedly nonprofit “We Build The Wall” campaign for personal gain. Despite portraying the group as a volunteer effort, Bannon received more than $1 million and used some of it to pay personal expenses, prosecutors said. Bannon denied the charges.
A pardon for Elliot Broidy, a fundraiser for both Trump and the Republican National Committee in 2016. Fugitive businessman Jho Low initially paid $6 million to Broidy and promised $75 million more if he succeeded in persuading the Justice Department to walk away from its civil forfeiture case. The back-channel efforts failed and Low was indicted in 2018 on charges of conspiring to launder billions of dollars embezzled from 1MDB. He has denied wrongdoing.
A commutation for Kwame Kilpatrick, who was convicted in 2013 on 24 counts of racketeering conspiracy, extortion, bribery and tax evasion and sentenced to 28 years in prison. He was mayor of Detroit from 2002 to 2008; prosecutors alleged his corruption contributed to the city’s bankruptcy five years after he left office.
A commutation for Salomon Melgen, a Palm Beach retinologist who was serving a 17-year sentence for Medicare fraud after billing the government to treat people for eye disease they didn’t have. Melgen’s commutation was supported by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat whom prosecutors alleged pressured federal agencies to help Melgen after receiving gifts and campaign contributions. Charges against Menendez were eventually dropped after a New Jersey jury was unable to reach a verdict.
A pardon for former Google executive Anthony Levandowski, an autonomous driving engineer who was ordered in August to spend 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google as he defected to Uber Technologies Inc., in one of the highest-profile criminal cases to hit Silicon Valley.
A conditional pardon to Duke Cunningham, a former congressman from California, who in 2005 pleaded guilty to bribery and other charges arising out of the scandal revolving around the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Cunningham, a Republican, was released from prison in 2013.
A pardon to Todd Boulanger, who had worked with Abramoff and pleaded guilty to conspiring to “commit honest services fraud.” He admitted to providing to public officials “all-expenses-paid travel, tens of thousands of dollars-worth of tickets to professional sporting events, concerts and other events, and frequent and expensive meals and drinks at Washington, D.C.-area restaurants and bars,” according to a 2009 Justice Department press release.
A pardon for former Representative Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican who served three years in prison on corruption, money laundering and other charges. He was convicted in 2013 of using his congressional seat to make companies buy his former business associate’s land so the associate could repay a debt to Renzi. Prosecutors also said he looted a family insurance business to help pay for his 2002 campaign.
A pardon for Aviem Sella, an Israeli indicted for espionage in connection with the Jonathan Pollard affair. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requested Sella’s pardon, the White House said in its statement.
A pardon for former InterMune CEO W. Scott Harkonen, who was convicted in 2009 of issuing a fraudulent press release touting a drug’s success against a fatal lung disease. Harkonen had unsuccessfully argued his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which rejected his appeal in 2013.
A pardon to Paul Erickson, a conservative political activist sentenced in July to seven years in prison following his conviction on fraud and money laundering charges. He was the boyfriend of Maria Butina, a Russian woman who sought to curry favor with Republican and gun-rights groups and later pleaded guilty to failing to register as a foreign agent.
A pardon for Ken Kurson, a former business associate of Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner. Prosecutors have charged Kurson with cyberstalking related to his 2015 divorce. The White House claimed the criminal investigation “only began because Mr. Kurson was nominated to a role within the Trump administration.”
Interestingly, so far, Trump himself and his family were not on the list, nor was his best bud, Rudy Guilliani. How cool would it have been if Trump dropped the hammer and actually pardoned Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency employee and subcontractor? These guys would’ve spilled the tea on everyone at high levels of government, the elites, uber-wealthy and on everything else we wanted to know about.
Julian Assange’s fiance and mother of their two young children issues last minute appeal for presidential pardon “Mr President you can still pardon Julian if you want to” #pardonAssangeNOW
Wait, news alert! Joe Exotic, from Netflix infamy (c’mon, admit it—you watched Tiger King, along with everyone else in America during the very early days of the pandemic), didn’t get a pardon that he was expecting.