President Donald Trump has been accused of making an “unforced error” in his recent round of pardons.
Panelists on CNN This Morning said in a debate on Wednesday that the White House’s latest pardons have slipped from the ideological into the blatantly corrupt.
The White House in recent weeks gave clemency to a MAGA sheriff who was convicted of accepting more than $75,000 worth of bribes in a cash-for-badge scheme, a tax cheat whose mom attended Trump’s $1 million-a-seat Mar-a-Lago dinner, and a reality television couple convicted of tax evasion and bank fraud.
Hyma Moore, a strategist for the Democrats, said the latest round “feels like an unforced error for Donald Trump to go this far on these pardons.”
“Sometimes these pardons have been used to sort of reinforce a narrative that you want to sort of be an umbrella of your administration, and I don’t know what Donald Trump is doing right now with these with these pardons and what’s happened over the last couple of months,” Moore added.
“It’s like you pardon people who are who have been who’ve been prosecuted for fraud seems like a bad narrative, particularly when you are taking a plane from a foreign country, when you have questions about your own ethics and the ethics of your family, the Bitcoin stuff.”
Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, said most Americans see the pardon system as “kind of gross and broken.”
“I mean, remember on Donald Trump’s first day in office, the thing that he did that was perhaps the most outrageous and certainly tested the worst in the polling I was doing was pardoning the Jan. 6 folks,” she added.
“But that very same day, on his way out of office, Joe Biden had pardoned his whole family. There have been shameful pardons.”
Jonathan Allen, senior national politics reporter for NBC News, said it appeared there are “two routes to a Trump pardon.”
“One is you can make a colorable argument that Biden went after you politically, or two, you put a lot of money into electing Donald Trump, and maybe those things combine in some cases to make it even stronger argument. But it seems like there’s a pretty clear pattern here.”
MAGA sheriff Scott Jenkins who was convicted of accepting more than $75,000 in bribes was jailed for 10 years in Dec. 2024 for conspiracy, honest services fraud, and bribery.
He was pardoned this week after Trump alleged that Jenkins had been “dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden DOJ.”
Tax cheat Paul Walczak, who stole money intended to pay his employees’ taxes in order to fund his extravagant lifestyle, was pardoned by Trump on April 25.
His pardon application claimed over zealous prosecutors went after him because of his mom’s efforts to help Trump get elected—but did not lead to an immediate pardon. It was three weeks after Walczak’s mom paid $1 million to attend a dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago that her son received a full and unconditional pardon.
Also, reality television couple Todd and Julie Chrisley who convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion were pardoned this week after Trump recognized that they “were targeted because of their conservative values and high profile‚” the couple’s lawyer said.
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