President Donald Trump has pardoned Rudy Giuliani and a host of other prominent allies involved in his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a Justice Department official said late Sunday, furthering Trump’s efforts to rewrite the history of his losing campaign five years ago.
The move appeared to carry no immediate practical effect as none of the more than 75 people listed have been charged with federal crimes, though several have been prosecuted in states including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada for roles in the alleged scheme to submit fake electors during Congress’s ratification of the 2020 vote. As president, Trump has no authority to pardon people facing state-level charges.
President Donald Trump has pardoned Rudy Giuliani and a host of other prominent allies involved in his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a Justice Department official said late Sunday, furthering Trump’s efforts to rewrite the history of his losing campaign five years ago.
The move appeared to carry no immediate practical effect as none of the more than 75 people listed have been charged with federal crimes, though several have been prosecuted in states including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada for roles in the alleged scheme to submit fake electors during Congress’s ratification of the 2020 vote. As president, Trump has no authority to pardon people facing state-level charges.
Still, the clemency — granted to key figures who have faced years of scrutiny by local prosecutors, congressional committees and local bar associations — signaled Trump’s continued focus on relitigating his 2020 defeat and furthering false claims of widespread voter fraud in current elections.
Trump has escalated pressure on the Justice Department to scrutinize his loss, and the White House recently hired a lawyer who helped contest the results. He also recently claimed without evidence that Californians’ decisive vote last week to redraw their congressional map was “rigged.”
Trump’s latest move elevates an obsession that animates elements of his base but alienates many others at a time when many Republicans — facing tough election losses — want to refocus on the economy.
“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” the pardon proclamation read.
It was shared on social media late Sunday by Pardon Attorney Ed Martin. The White House did not immediately respond Monday to questions on when Trump signed it.
Among those specifically listed in the pardon were Giuliani, who served as Trump’s lawyer during the 2020 election fight; Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff; conservative attorneys Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and John Eastman; Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who pushed to keep Trump in power; and Boris Epshteyn, a political and legal adviser to the president in both his first and second terms.
“These great Americans were persecuted and put through hell by the Biden Administration for challenging an election, which is the cornerstone of democracy,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Getting prosecuted for challenging results is something that happens in communist Venezuela, not the United States of America, and President Trump is putting an end to the Biden Regime’s communist tactics once and for all.”
The proclamation’s language also extends broadly, granting clemency to “all United States citizens” involved in the fake-elector scheme “as well as for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 presidential election.”
However, it does not apply to Trump. He has long maintained he has the power to pardon himself if he wishes, but that legal conclusion has not been tested in court.
Martin, the pardon attorney who also leads a Justice Department task force known as the “Weaponization Working Group,” outlined the legal justification for the pardons in a memo released Monday. In it, he re-aired a litany of long-standing complaints about the security of mail voting, mainstream media coverage of the 2020 race and what he described as efforts by social media to censor conservative voices.
Although courts across the country and several investigations have found no evidence of widespread irregularities in the 2020 election, Martin asserted that the election “was seriously and significantly marred, and the American people were not supposed to talk about it — much less try to do anything about it.”
Martin maintained that states had no authority to charge anyone with crimes related to the false-electors scheme, arguing that Congress’s ratification of the vote was a function of federal, not state, law. Similar arguments made by defendants in those cases who sought to have their charges removed to federal court have been rejected by state courts.
Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer during Trump’s first administration who has become a critic, said the pardons show the Trump team’s fixation on 2020.
“There’s no reason to pardon at this stage of the game,” Cobb said, “other than as part of … the Trump administration effort to cleanse the uncleanable stain of January 6 from the history books and portray it as something it clearly wasn’t.”
Trump is the only defendant to have faced federal charges in connection with efforts to subvert the 2020 election results; it was in a case brought by special counsel Jack Smith. Those charges were withdrawn after a Supreme Court ruling last year recognized broad immunity for actions Trump took while in office and after he won the 2024 election. Justice Department policy bars prosecution of a sitting president.
Smith’s indictment referenced Giuliani, Powell, Clark and Eastman as alleged co-conspirators in the effort but did not charge them with crimes. Even if a future Democratic administration were interested in pursuing cases against those figures and others, the five-year statute of limitations on many of the relevant federal crimes would have already expired regardless of Trump’s pardons.
Giuliani and others were among those hit with state-level charges for their alleged efforts to organize and submit slates of fake presidential electors purporting to cast electoral college votes in favor of Trump. Those probes largely have either hit legal dead ends or continue to limp along.
In Georgia, the only state case in which Trump was charged, a judge disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis from continuing to oversee it amid questions about a romantic relationship she had with the prosecutor she hired to lead it. A judge has given a state board a Friday deadline to appoint a new office to oversee the prosecution or the charges will be dismissed.
A judge in Michigan tossed charges that state Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) had brought against more than a dozen Republicans who had purported to be presidential electors there. So, too, did a Nevada judge who dismissed a case brought by state Attorney General Aaron Ford (D), ruling the charges had been filed in the wrong venue. Ford’s office refiled in a separate county.
A court in Arizona ordered state Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) to present her case against several Trump administration officials and allies to a grand jury again, saying the panel who voted on the first indictment had not been properly instructed on the law. Mayes’s office has appealed that decision.
Meanwhile, a similar case in Wisconsin continues.
Some of the people pardoned Sunday — including Ellis, Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who helped spearhead the fake-elector strategy — had pleaded guilty in the state cases in which they were charged. Trump’s pardon does not affect their status in those cases.
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, was one of the most prominent backers of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He has since been disbarred in New York and D.C. over his representation of the Trump campaign in a case seeking to overturn Pennsylvania’s results. He also lost a multimillion-dollar defamation case brought by two former election workers in Georgia whom he accused of working to steal the election there.
Ted Goodman, an attorney for Giuliani, said Monday that the former mayor “stands by his work.”
“Mayor Giuliani never sought a pardon but is deeply grateful for President Trump’s decision,” Goodman said. “This action further highlights the years of unjust attacks against the mayor and so many others, and reinforces what should now be clear to everyone — Mayor Giuliani deserves to have his bar license immediately reinstated without delay.”
Clark, the former Justice Department official whom Trump considered installing as attorney general to further his election challenges, thanked the president in a social media post Monday but noted he’s still facing possible disbarment in D.C.
“I shouldn’t have had to battle this witch hunt for 4+ years,” he wrote, asking supporters to contribute to his legal fund. “I wish I could be declaring this legal nonsense over for good.”
Some Republican lawmakers celebrated the pardons. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) called them “well-deserved,” while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) thanked the president and said his administration should also “free” Tina Peters, a former county election official in Colorado who was sentenced to prison on state charges related to copying election data.
It is not clear how the Trump administration could get Peters out of prison, as she was not sentenced in a federal case. But Martin, the attorney who announced the pardons Sunday, responded on X to someone asking why Peters was not on the pardon list.
“We are working on it!” Martin said, without providing more details.
Hannah Knowles and Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.
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