Let me tell you about four very different men who share something quite important in common.
On Monday, a man named Jonathan Braun was sentenced to 27 months in prison. The charges against him included sexually assaulting the live-in nanny for his own children and attacking a nurse with an IV pole. He was also accused of assaulting a 3-year-old child.
In October, a man named Christopher Moynihan was arrested and charged with threatening via text to “eliminate” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, at a speaking engagement in New York City on Oct. 20.
In March, a federal jury convicted a man named Eliyahu Weinstein of defrauding investors of $41 million. As Bloomberg reported, he had falsely promised “to invest their money in Covid-19 masks, scarce baby formula and first-aid kits bound for Ukraine.”
In January, an Indiana sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a man named Matthew Huttle when he reportedly raised a firearm during a traffic stop. Huttle was being arrested for a felony traffic violation when he resisted arrest. A special prosecutor charged with investigating the case said the deputy’s use of force was “legally justified.”
Four different men. Four very different crimes. But their common trait is that each of them had previously received a pardon, commutation or clemency from President Trump. And they’re only a small fraction of a larger number. As our newsroom reported this week, at least eight people to whom Trump granted clemency in his first term have since been charged with a crime.
In addition, “Several others pardoned more recently after being convicted of offenses committed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have also run into trouble with the law.”
But the pardons just keep coming. On Sunday, Trump granted sweeping pardons to 77 people who helped him attempt to subvert the 2020 election. Last week, Trump pardoned Glen Casada, the Republican former speaker of the Tennessee House, and Casada’s former chief of staff, Cade Cothren. Both men had been convicted of charges including wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
In the same set of pardons, Trump also pardoned Robert Harshbarger Jr., the husband of Diana Harshbarger, a Republican representative from Tennessee. As our newsroom reported, Robert had pleaded guilty to “health care fraud and distributing a misbranded drug, in this case kidney medications, some of which came from China, that were not approved for the purpose by the Food and Drug Administration.”
This is just a partial list of the most notorious and unjustifiable pardons of Trump’s second term so far.
I mentioned one of the most brazen in my column two Sundays ago — the pardon of the crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao.
The pardon came after Zhao’s company, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, “took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture’s new stablecoin product, enhancing its credibility and pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.”
So what do all of these people have in common? It’s certainly not that they’re deserving of pardons. There isn’t a meaningful claim of actual innocence in the bunch, and in almost every case there’s no meaningful evidence of unusually harsh treatment or unjust sentencing. No, the thing they have in common is they are either allies of Trump and his associates or used connections to Trump or his family (or helped enrich Trump) to get relief from justice.
Trump is hardly the first president to abuse the pardon power. In his last weeks in office, Joe Biden pardoned his son and commuted the sentences of thousands of other convicted criminals. Some of these pardons were defensible, but many were not. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The Times in October, “Biden acted over the objections of his own Office of the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice, which performed rigorous scrutiny of the applicants for clemency.”
All told, Biden granted 80 pardons and 4,165 commutations during his one four-year term, a number, according to the Pew Research Center, that “far exceeds the total of any other president since the beginning of the 20th century, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
Any list of Bill Clinton’s most infamous acts also includes pardons. On his last day in office, he pardoned his brother, Roger, from his drug conviction, and he pardoned a fugitive named Marc Rich after Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, gave $450,000 to the Clinton Presidential Library.
Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, while not corrupt, was also deeply misguided. It set a precedent of placing American presidents beyond the reach of the law. But Andrew Johnson’s blanket pardon of Confederates was infinitely worse — it cleared the way for their return to state and federal power after the Civil War and helped set the stage for a century of brutal repression of Black Americans in the South.
In fact, if we’re going to compare Trump to anyone, Johnson is the best match. Just like Johnson, Trump pardoned men who directly attacked American democracy. Unlike Johnson, however, Trump’s pardons are obvious rewards for personal service and for personal connections.
Acting just like a corrupt king, Trump is transforming the American system of justice into his personal plaything. Friends of the crown break the law with impunity. Enemies of the crown experience the sharp end of the law, whether they deserve it or not.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. If there was one element of the American Constitution that set off the most urgent alarm during the founding era, it was the pardon power — Article II’s grant of absolute, unchecked power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
For example, at the Virginia ratification convention, George Mason, a founding father and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, was recorded as saying that the president “ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself” — a situation that eerily forecasts Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons.
Mason was concerned that the president’s pardon power was so great that it could be fatal to the United States. “It may happen, at some future day,” Mason said, “that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.”
Writing under the pseudonym Cato, an anti-Federalist thought to be the then-New York governor George Clinton warned against the “unrestrained power of granting pardons for treason, which may be used to screen from punishment, those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt.”
Again, there are echoes of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, except there was nothing secret about Trump’s misconduct in 2020 and 2021.
Writing under the pseudonym Brutus, an anti-Federalist thought to be Robert Yates, an associate justice of the New York Supreme Court of Judicature, warned that the pardon power (among other presidential powers) would be used “to the purposes of gratifying their own interest and ambition, and it is scarcely possible, in a very large republic, to call them to account for their misconduct, or to prevent their abuse of power.”
The Federalists’ answer to the anti-Federalists was simple — don’t worry, they argued; Congress will impeach a corrupt president. In his response to Mason, James Madison reportedly argued, “If the president be connected in any suspicious manner with any persons, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter himself; the House of Representatives can impeach him: They can remove him if found guilty.”
Yes, the House can impeach the president. Yes, the Senate can convict him or her. But the Senate has never convicted an American president, and there is no real hope that it ever will. If history teaches us anything, it’s that impeachment has not checked presidential abuses of power, and it’s hard to imagine that it ever will.
And so we remain at risk, and it’s not hard to see how Trump could use the pardon power to break American democracy. His pardons won’t just protect friends and family members who abuse power to enrich themselves, as bad as that is. As his Jan. 6 pardons show, he’ll use the power to excuse even those allies who commit acts of sedition.
I shudder to think of the outright criminality that Trump and his allies could resort to during the 2026 midterms, much less the 2028 presidential election. One doesn’t have to imagine wild fantasies of a Trump third term to imagine systemic abuses of power to suppress or miscount dissenting votes — all to hand power to his chosen successor, who can then enter office free of any federal criminal cloud.
I’m frequently asked about my ideas for legal and constitutional reform. I revere the Constitution, but it’s not a divinely inspired document. Our founders did have blind spots, and it’s quite clear that one of the most glaring was handing too much power to the president.
I know that constitutional amendments sound unrealistic. But we are afflicted with recency bias, tempted to think that our present polarization is a permanent part of American politics. But it is not. We have cycled through episodes of division and unity, and periods of crisis are often followed by periods of reform.
To give the most salient example, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments that were ratified after the Civil War gave life to Abraham Lincoln’s promise in the Gettysburg Address of a “new birth of freedom.” The amendments were so consequential that they represented a second founding of the United States of America.
After Franklin D. Roosevelt won four consecutive presidential terms, we amended the Constitution to term-limit presidents. In the years following Watergate, Congress passed a series of statutory reforms intended to limit presidential power. The Trump era shall pass as well, and those of us who love our American republic should be prepared to close its constitutional loopholes and destroy the imperial presidency once and for all.
Here’s one suggestion: Amend Article II so that it states that the president “shall have Power, with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate, to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”
The pardon power should exist as a matter of last resort, deployed only when the American legal system has truly failed to deliver justice, or when the national interest in a pardon is overwhelming. The legislative approval should be supermajority so that it’s broadly supported by America’s elected representatives.
An amendment to the pardon power stands a chance in part because public disgust at presidential pardon abuse is bipartisan. Republicans are furious at Biden. Democrats are furious at Trump. Millions of Americans are disgusted by both men’s pardons — as well as many of the pardons that came before.
To preserve America’s future, we need to heed the warnings of the past. We can’t dismiss this statement as a mere truism. The fears of the anti-Federalists were rooted in raw truths about human nature and the corrupting influence of unchecked power. And few of those fears were more urgent — or more prescient — than the warning against one of the last vestiges of royalty in American law.
Some other things I did
On Sunday, I wrote about the fight for the soul of the Republican Party and the dark and disturbing rise of antisemitism and even admiration for Hitler in parts of the right. In short, the fish rots from the head:
A movement, especially one that verges on an outright cult of personality, is defined by its leader, not by its rank and file. And when the leader is lawless and depraved, then efforts to contain his influence while preserving his power are doomed to fail.
The proof is everywhere. Throughout the Trump era, many of the most prominent voices of right-wing America have only become shriller, angrier and, yes, more racist and more antisemitic. The right-wing media universe is culturally different in 2025 than it was in 2015 — substantially so.
The balance of power has flipped upside down. The fringe has become mainstream, and the mainstream has become fringe.
On Saturday, my conversation with Michelle Cottle and Jamelle Bouie centered around the 2025 elections. Why did the Democrats do so well? In part because they fielded quality candidates in Virginia and New Jersey. But it’s also because Trump forgot the reason he won:
French: The Trump administration in a lot of ways misread its victory in a pretty dramatic fashion. It was not a mandate to pardon all the Jan. 6-ers. It was not a mandate to go after every dissenting law firm in America. It was not a mandate to put masked police all over the streets of American cities and engage in gross and brutal acts of violence out in public on a nearly daily basis. It was not a mandate to engineer military deployments to American cities on obviously false, fake pretext.
So, look, none of this should be surprising. This wasn’t what he was elected by, the big mass of people who are not MAGA. Now, you will find on Twitter all the time this sentiment where it’s a very brutal video or a very vicious statement from Trump and people will say, “I voted for this.” Or the grainy videos of the drone strikes or the airstrikes in, outside of Venezuela.
Cottle: Yeah, but Twitter’s still not real life.
French: That’s what I’m saying — that’s not real life. They have convinced themselves it is.
And then the other thing here is that unless the Republicans course-correct, unless they get this through their heads, they’re going to continue to have this problem: There’s no sign that the administration itself is really keeping its eye on the public as opposed to this weird, bespoke world of right-wing influencers. This is how they’re gauging themselves a lot, is: How is the right-wing podcast world or the right-wing Twitter world reacting to me? And they’re exquisitely sensitive about that, and they don’t give a rip about normal political metrics and measures and normal political rhetoric.
So if they keep doing this, we are not on their floor yet. We are nowhere near their floor.
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The post Pardon Me. I Am Not Done Committing Crimes. appeared first on New York Times.
