President Trump is employing the vast power of his office to redefine criminality — using pardons to inoculate criminals he happens to like, downplaying corruption and fraud as crimes and seeking to stigmatize political opponents by labeling them criminals.
In the past few days, Mr. Trump has offered pardons or clemency to more than two dozen people embraced by his obstreperous right-wing base, or favored by people in his orbit. Most are political allies, some are former officeholders accused of abusing power for personal gain, and almost all were convicted of white-collar crimes like fraud, tax evasion and campaign finance violations — not far removed from accusations Mr. Trump himself has faced.
“No MAGA left behind,” crowed Ed Martin, the pardon attorney at the Justice Department who suggested that the department should investigate Mr. Trump’s adversaries to shame them if there was insufficient evidence to charge them.
Mr. Trump has said the current wave of pardons is justified by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s last-minute reprieves for inmates on federal death row, and pardons he issued to his family — which Mr. Trump called “disgraceful.” The new pardons are necessary to right the wrongs of a politicized Biden Justice Department that twice indicted him, he has claimed.
Yet, critics say, Mr. Trump has used the pardon powers of the presidency to not only settle accounts, as Mr. Biden did, but to burn the ledger.
“Granting pardons or commuting sentences of public officials or other white-collar criminals convicted of fraud, tax evasion and other breaches of trust is likely to have the effect of normalizing nonviolent crimes,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor who served as a U.S. attorney in the state during the Obama administration.
“Of course, stealing by fraud is still stealing,” she added. “It’s just that this is the way rich people do it.”
Mr. Trump made no secret of his intention to seek retribution against those who prosecuted him at the local, state and federal levels, whom he has described collectively as “scum.”
An offshoot of this strategy is relegating white-collar offenses to a rank of secondary importance behind violent and property crimes. He has even tried to create a new red-alert category — what he calls “immigrant crime,” even though studies have shown that immigrants are not more likely to commit violent offenses than people born in the country.
Another Trump objective: Rewriting the history of the Capitol riot to minimize the actions of his supporters and emphasize the hardship they endured by being prosecuted. He has gone so far as to call some of those who were imprisoned “hostages.”
Hours after declaring at his inauguration that “the scales of justice will be rebalanced,” Mr. Trump granted blanket clemency to around 1,600 rioters, some of them violent, who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It instantly obliterated the biggest and most logistically complex investigation in the history of the Justice Department and was followed, in short order, by a purge of career prosecutors who obtained the convictions.
At the time, Matthew M. Graves, the U.S. attorney in Washington who oversaw many of the trials, said the move undermined the rule of law and set a dangerous precedent by removing the main deterrence against future acts of insurrection and violence by would-be rioters.
“The question becomes, will their acts of political violence and destruction also be pardoned and if not, why not?” he said.
If the Jan. 6 clemency edict was broad, Mr. Trump’s recent actions disproportionately favor the powerful, famous, well-connected and wealthy. The president, who ran on a platform of law and order, has struck a softer tone for white-collar offenders, erasing convictions and slashing sentences by citing baseless claims that prosecutions were politically motivated, often suggesting their crimes were no big deal in the first place.
This week, he justified pardoning Scott Jenkins, the former sheriff of Culpeper County, Va., and a political ally sentenced to 10 years for bribery, saying Mr. Jenkins had been “dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized” Justice Department during the Biden administration. In fact, Mr. Jenkins was convicted after evidence showed that he had taken $75,000 in bribes from several businessmen in exchange for making them auxiliary deputy sheriffs in his department.
Other recipients of Trump leniency included a confessed tax cheat whose mother is a Trump fund-raiser; a donor after Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory who was convicted of campaign finance crimes; a former Republican congressman from Staten Island who used Mr. Trump’s “witch hunt” argument to defend himself against tax charges (he was convicted anyway); a labor leader from Long Island who failed to report $300,000 in gifts; a husband-and-wife reality TV team found guilty of defrauding banks of more than $30 million to support their lavish lifestyle; and the co-founder of Death Row Records, who had been serving a long sentence for conspiracy to commit murder and endorsed Mr. Trump last year.
These actions follow a systematic effort inside the Justice Department to dismantle units that investigate public corruption, fraud and foreign interference in U.S. businesses and elections. The department’s public integrity unit, which has been responsible for overseeing investigations into political figures, has had its staffing cut to under a dozen from about 30 last year, according to current and former officials.
The president’s view of pardons has also been reflected in the cases the department decides to prosecute.
In February, department officials, working in consultation with Mr. Trump, moved to drop the long-running bribery case against the Democratic mayor of New York, Eric Adams, who promised not to block federal immigration roundups in the nation’s biggest city.
The interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, a conservative career prosecutor, resigned rather than sign off, saying it was her duty “to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor.”
At the same time, Mr. Trump and his allies have publicized actions taken against local leaders and judges who oppose the White House agenda, vandals who attack Elon Musk’s businesses, and, in some cases, people who have simply gotten on the president’s bad side.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has ordered up, explicitly or indirectly, federal investigations of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, who posted (and quickly deleted) an image of seashells arrayed on a beach to read “86 47”; celebrities like Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Springsteen for making campaign appearances on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris; and Chris Krebs, a former cybersecurity official who refuted Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Mr. Martin, the self-described “captain” of the Justice Department’s “weaponization” group, has made it clear that he will use his new authority to expose and discredit those he believes to be guilty, even if he cannot find sufficient evidence to prosecute them.
“If they can be charged, we’ll charge them,” Mr. Martin told reporters before stepping down as interim U.S. attorney in Washington. “But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”
Other political appointees in the department have also seized opportunities to target administration critics for law enforcement action. This month, Alina Habba, the interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey, announced that she was charging Representative LaMonica McIver, a Democrat from the state, with assaulting a law enforcement official during a protest at an immigrant detention facility in Newark. She was forced to drop trespassing charges against the city’s Democratic mayor.
Ms. McIver accused the administration of trying to “criminalize and deter legislative oversight.”
Ms. Habba responded with a favorite riposte of Trump Justice Department officials: “No one is above the law.”
That — perhaps not coincidentally — was also the go-to line from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland during the Biden administration, when asked why he approved of the federal indictments of Mr. Trump.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
The post Trump’s Flurry of Pardons Signals a Wholesale Effort to Redefine Crime appeared first on New York Times.
