When Donald Trump pardoned U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar earlier this month, he added to a spate of clemencies that has directly attacked a founding principle of America’s democratic republic: the expectation that elected representatives will serve as fiduciaries of the public trust. Cuellar became the 11th elected American official to receive clemency from President Trump this year. Other presidents have shied away from using the pardon power to protect public officials. Joe Biden issued individual pardons to just two state-level elected officials, but not for crimes that occurred while they held public office. Neither Barack Obama nor George W. Bush pardoned any elected officials during their respective eight years in office.
Trump, by contrast, has pardoned both well-known figures such as Cuellar, accused of taking $600,000 in bribes from foreign companies; Representative George Santos of New York, who defrauded his constituents in virtually every conceivable way; and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell a U.S. Senate seat; and lesser characters, such as a state official in Nevada who stole money from a police memorial fund, an elected sheriff in Virginia who sold badges for cash, and a former Tennessee state legislator who defrauded taxpayers to win contracts for his business. Cuellar’s pardon came just days after Trump’s unprecedented pardon of a foreign head of state—former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez—who was convicted of corrupting his own government from the top down by operating it as a narco-state. Trump pardoned at least 10 public officials in his first term in office.
[Read: Trump grants clemency to one of the world’s richest men]
Since Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which prompted swift public backlash, pardons for official corruption have been rare, until now. The Justice Department—whose Office of the Pardon Attorney advises the president on pardons—has long considered crimes involving a breach of the public trust to be among the most serious offenses on the books. That office, which I led from 2022 until March of this year, has rarely if ever recommended pardons for such betrayals. In effect, Trump’s pardons are licensing elected officials, at all levels of government, to profit off the powers entrusted to them by the American people.
Trump’s agenda transcends partisan politics. In addition to Cuellar and Blagojevich (who recently visited the Justice Department), Trump has pardoned a third Democratic politician this year: Alexander Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati city councilman convicted of bribery and attempted extortion. Elected officials on both sides have also benefited from dismissals of prosecutions, sweetheart plea deals, and the dismantling of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, a specialized unit created to target public corruption. Trump’s goal is much more ambitious than boosting his political allies—he is aiming to fundamentally reshape the American system of governance to make room for graft. Such self-enrichment is antithetical to a government that is supposed to serve the people.
Trump, though, has moved swiftly to implement a different vision for American government. He is engineering a return to a patronage system, in which pardons feature prominently. The Justice Department used to rely on merit-based guidelines, rooted in considerations of remorse, rehabilitation, and redemption. Trump has abandoned those, favoring instead a transactional approach. Pardon seekers once applied for relief through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, a process that can be lengthy and cumbersome due to rigorous vetting requirements. Today, wealthy and powerful pardon hopefuls are funneling their requests straight to the president’s desk by way of well-connected intermediaries. Untold sums are changing hands along the way, in the form of lobbying fees, legal services, donations, and investments.
Trump has discovered that pardons can serve as an inexhaustible supply of currency that he can print with his own hand and dispense as easily as signing a check. He is using the currency of pardons to amass power, wielding their possibility as a tool to command political loyalty. This was obvious in the case of Cuellar, who lavished Trump with praise and gratitude after the announcement.
Pardons have also been a lucrative source of personal wealth for this president. The desire to obtain a pardon looks to have induced a foreign billionaire to broker a multibillion-dollar investment using the Trump-family cryptocurrency company. The same ambition appears to have driven a well-heeled Palm Beach mother to shell out $1 million for the opportunity to make her case for her son’s clemency over dinner with the president at Mar-a-Lago. Others have donated handsomely to Trump’s campaign.
[Casey Michel: America has never seen corruption like this]
Pardons are just one piece of a larger strategy to take America back to a “spoils system” of government. This phrase emerged during the presidency of Andrew Jackson—Trump’s favored predecessor—when Senator William Marcy of New York, who defended Jackson’s stacking of government with political loyalists, said, “To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” In the decades that followed, Congress ended the spoils system with a series of legislative enactments that created a nonpartisan, merit-based civil-service government. Trump is now seeking to restore the old way of doing business, including bypassing the civil-service laws—which he views as an unconstitutional constraint on his Article II powers—to replace career officials with political loyalists. (Case in point: My former post of pardon attorney historically has been reserved for a nonpolitical official; the person who now holds the post is a staunch partisan operative.) Normalizing public corruption through clemency is another flex of the president’s Article II powers.
Trump’s destruction of long-standing clemency norms is already having numerous corrosive effects on democracy. It undermines public trust in government. It undercuts the fair and impartial administration of justice. And it licenses public officials to place their own personal and financial interests ahead of the interests of the people they were elected to serve, just as Donald Trump is doing at the very top. To him, of course, that’s not a problem; it’s the goal.
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