Former Department of Justice pardon attorney Liz Oyer is warning that President Donald Trump’s aggressive use of clemency power has already produced dangerous consequences, particularly for defendants involved in the January 6 Capitol riot.
In a guest essay for The New York Times, Oyer said that in the opening months of Trump’s second term, the country has already witnessed “alarming cases of recidivism among the Jan. 6 defendants pardoned on Mr. Trump’s first day in office.”
“Some have been charged with or convicted of offenses involving sexual exploitation of children, threats against public officials, and even a plot to kill federal employees. Several clemency recipients from Mr. Trump’s first term in office — when vetting was similarly casual — have also returned to prison.”
Oyer, who served as the DOJ’s pardon attorney from 2022 to 2025, said that’s because Trump bypassed the traditional, merit-based review process her office used to vet clemency applicants. On Inauguration Day, Trump issued about 1,500 pardons tied to January 6 without consulting her or her team, even as her office was still expected to facilitate the releases, she wrote Friday in the Times.
“Over the next three days, 27 more pardons were granted, all without even a nod to the traditional role of the Justice Department in advising the president on pardons,” Oyer added. By contrast, Oyer said, prior presidents, including Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush, relied on careful evaluations by the DOJ’s pardon attorney, a position she held for nearly three years.
“Ignoring a careful, merit-based review of clemency applicants is a dangerous proposition,” she wrote Friday in the Times. Oyer went on to criticize congressional Republicans, who she said have stood by Trump by choosing “to focus on investigating the pardons issued by his predecessor” instead of “forcefully confronting the corrosive effects of Mr. Trump’s reckless pardoning.”
While Oyer, author of the newsletter Lawyer Oyer, also had tough words for Biden’s late-term pardons, including his pardons of his son, Hunter, and other Biden family members, she argued that Trump’s approach poses a far greater threat to the U.S. justice system.
“Both quantitatively and qualitatively, what Mr. Trump is doing with pardons is far more damaging to the American ideal of delivering justice evenhandedly,” she concluded.
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