Donald Trump’s aggressive use of his presidential pardon powers has reached such a fevered pitch that some White House insiders are getting nervous about blowback that they are not prepared to push back on.
According to a deep dive from the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Ballhaus, Josh Dawsey and C. Ryan Barber on the almost weekly presidential announcements of commutations and pardons flying out of the Oval Office, some of the high-profile cases were not vetted and flew under the radar of even some White House insiders.
That includes White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, long regarded as the most successful of the president’s Oval Office gatekeepers.
The Journal is reporting that Trump’s abrupt and controversial pardon of former Honduran presidentJuan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted of working with cartels to flood the US with 400 tons of cocaine, shocked insiders.
According to the Journal, Wiles was blindsided by the announcement.
“Trump pardoned Hernández so quickly that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and other senior officials had no advance notice,” the Journal is reporting before adding, “Even Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally who had been pushing for the pardon, told people he was stunned by Trump’s speed. Stone said he wasn’t paid for his advocacy, which he said came after he had reviewed the case.”
Wiles has been under increasing scrutiny after she sat down for a series of interviews with Vanity Fair where she took potshots at some of her White House colleagues and hinted at chaos within the administration.
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