Members of convicted felon Donald Trump’s inner circle are scrambling to slow down his excessive use of presidential pardons.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and other members of senior leadership are alarmed by the optics and “chaos” of the president’s pardon process—so much so that they’ve “iced out” his presidential pardon czar, Alice Johnson, three people with knowledge of the situation told NOTUS on Tuesday.
Trump’s advisers have reportedly limited Johnson’s access to the president in an effort to reduce the number of problematic pardons he is granting. Several meetings with Johnson—who was herself pardoned by Trump in 2020, thanks to help from Kim Kardashian—and others involved in the pardon process were abruptly removed from Trump’s schedule in late 2025, NOTUS reported.
“It’s not just [Susie] that’s concerned,” one source told NOTUS. “Everyone has had this concern.”
Trump has issued around 1,700 pardons since returning to office. Those granted clemency include Jan. 6 Capitol rioters, crypto moguls with business ties to the Trump Organization, and, most recently, five former professional football players on Thursday for crimes including perjury and drug trafficking.
Federal lobbyists have also reportedly earned millions of dollars over the past year from criminals seeking pardons or clemency from Trump. In some cases, Trump’s staffers have had to pull pardons at the eleventh hour after officials determined recipients stood to directly profit from them, NOTUS reported.
“There is no process, there is no right way to do this,” one person involved in the pardon process said. “It’s chaos.”
For his part, however, Trump remains unconcerned with public reaction to his clemency decisions. After Johnson managed to briefly speak with the president at his sprawling Mar-a-Lago estate on New Year’s Eve, she reportedly secured four presidential pardons.
“At this point, Trump really doesn’t give a s-–t about public reactions to his pardons,” another source told the outlet.
Johnson was sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for a first-time, nonviolent drug conviction and spent more than 20 years behind bars until Trump granted her clemency in June 2018. On Aug. 28, 2020, he gave her a full pardon.
Today, the 70-year-old grandmother is a criminal justice reform advocate who is meant to be the president’s point person on pardons. Yet Trump himself has at times struggled to articulate why he has issued certain pardons.
In November, Trump, 79, claimed he had “no idea” who Changpeng Zhao—the founder of crypto exchange Binance—was after pardoning him.
Zhao had pleaded guilty to money laundering violations that allowed criminal groups to move money connected to drug trafficking and child abuse. The October pardon came just months after Binance struck a $2 billion partnership deal with the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.
“I don’t know who he is,” Trump said. “I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
In a statement, a White House official told NOTUS that Johnson “is the perfect person to be pardon czar and works alongside [Office of Legal Counsel] and [White House Counsel] to put forth pardon recommendations to the President.”
“Alice regularly meets with WH officials and the President on pardon recommendations,” they added.
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