SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
pardons
Sensing Opportunity, White-Collar Criminals Vie for Trump Pardons
"Everybody that is in prison now is keenly aware of the environment, and it's become a very hot topic within the low- and minimum-security inmate communities," said a consultant who has advised white-collared convicts.
Mar 11, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump began his second term with a blitz of clemency actions, including issuing pardons and commutations for over 1,500 rioters convicted in connection to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and pardoning Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, and now the president's "moves to expand the use of pardons have white-collar defendants jolting to attention," according to Tuesday reporting from Politico.
Those reportedly angling for clemency include individuals like jailed crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried, former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) who earlier this year was sentenced to 11 years in prison for corruption and bribery, two reality TV stars guilty of defrauding banks and evading taxes, and a member of the music group the Fugees who was convicted for taking part in an embezzlement scheme.
Sam Mangel, a consultant to people convicted of white-collar crime who has advised individuals like Bankman-Fried, told Politico that "everybody that is in prison now is keenly aware of the environment, and it's become a very hot topic within the low- and minimum-security inmate communities."
According to The New York Times, "The new administration has a team of appointees focusing on the process early in Mr. Trump's term, with a particular focus on clemency grants that underscore the president's own grievances about what he sees as the political weaponization of the justice system."
Accordingly, clemency petitioners are "tailoring their pitches to the president by emphasizing their loyalty to him and echoing his claims of political persecution," per the Times.
For example, a lawyer representing conservative reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley wrote in a document prepared for the Trump administration that the couple's conviction for bank fraud and tax evasion "exemplifies the weaponization of justice against conservatives and public figures, eroding basic constitutional protections."
Some, like Menendez, have made themselves out to be the victims of the "corrupt" justice system.
"President Trump is right," wrote Menendez on X the day he was sentenced to 11 years in prison. "This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system."
In Trump's first term, his use of clemency was "all about cronyism and partisanship and helping out his friends and his political advisers," Rachel Barkow, a professor at New York University School of Law, told the Times. This time around, "the potential for corruption is higher," she said, "because they're starting early, they have figured out how they want to set it up so that people have a pipeline to get to them."
This shift in Trump's second term includes disempowering the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney and instead shifting control of the clemency operations to the White House Counsel's Office, according to anonymous sources cited by the Times.
Elizabeth Oyer, who had been the U.S. pardon attorney since being appointed in 2022, was fired last week after she refused to recommend that actor Mel Gibson—who is a supporter of Trump—should have his gun rights restored, according Monday reporting from the Times. Gibson lost his gun rights following a 2011 domestic violence misdemeanor conviction.
In late February, Trump also appointed White House "pardon czar" Alice Johnson. Both the appointment of Johnson and the departure of Oyer, "signal that Trump is not done exercising his clemency powers," according to Politico.
Keep ReadingShow Less
What Trump's Pardons and Retribution Say About His Fascist Threat
What history teaches should worry us very much.
Jan 29, 2025
President Trump’s recent granting of freedom to nearly 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists, followed by other actions fulfilling what the New York Times last week called “his promises to exact revenge on his perceived enemies,” emphasize the ominous portent of an authoritarian regime in the United States.
The history of fascist regimes documents a direct correlation between unleashing political violence and the intimidation, muzzling, arrests and worse of political opponents which leads to securing mass acceptance for repressive policies and governance.
“This is part of his plan,” said Capitol Police officer Michael Fanone who suffered a traumatic brain injury and heart attack after being pulled from the police line, beaten and shocked with a stun gun on January 6, 2021. “The plan is to pardon those on his behalf, because he knows that will send a message to the citizens of this country,” he told MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “If you commit crimes on my behalf, I support you. If you try to prevent me from doing things I want to do, you know what is coming.”
“This is actually about the future, why this is so dangerous,” said podcaster Jon Favreau. “Because now Donald Trump has pardoned all of these right-wing extremists who were armed, who committed violence, who are not apologetic at all, who are not maintaining their innocence either. They’ve said they’re guilty. They’re not apologetic. And now they’re out of prison. And other right-wing extremists who might want to cause violence now know that if you commit violence in Donald Trump’s name, then he’s got your back. And so why wouldn’t they commit violence again?”
While initial outrage focused on the pardons, Trump’s decision to pull security protections for people he has demonized who continue to face death threats, like infectious disease adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other moves targeting perceived opponents, underline the stakes. Trump’s “retribution is intended not just to impose punishment for the past but also to intimidate anyone who might cross him in the future,” said the Times calling it a “signal” Trump is “willing to impose potentially profound consequences on anyone he sees as having been insufficiently loyal.”
“We can take this back to 2015, when (Trump) said at his rallies punch them out to people who were protesting, and I’ll take care of your representation. I’ll pay for your lawyers,” noted Sherrilyn Ifill, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
Trump’s language in his campaign and first term helped fuel a rise in far-right hate speech that led to vigilante mass shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 and at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 by gunmen influenced by Trump’s violent rhetoric. It was also evident in the 2020 storming of the Michigan Capitol by armed anti-government militia and a plan by one group to abduct Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. That came after Trump encouraged supporters to “liberate” Democratic-led states from Covid-19 safety measures he opposed, and tweeted solidarity with the Michigan militia protesters.
The pinnacle of the violence, of course, was the January 6 insurrection intended to overturn the 2020 election. It emphatically escalated the role of violence to achieve authoritarian rule. That was the danger seen in Trump’s pardons within hours of his inauguration for his second term.
“Now they’re all talking about revenge,” noted Favreau. “Revenge against the people who testified, against the prosecutors, against the judges who put them in prison. And so like when the Proud Boys come to your community and start marching or menacing people or whatever the hell they do, what are the police going to do?”
“Now it’s our turn,” said Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who received the longest riot sentence for mobilizing his right-wing group as an “army” to keep Trump in power through violence after his pardon. Trial evidence showed he and his lieutenants, inspired by Trump’s directive to “stand by” during a 2020 presidential debate, joined what Trump promised would be a “wild” protest on January 6. Similarly, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes echoed Tarrio, projecting plans for retribution against police witnesses and prosecutors “on up the chain.”
“The most important part of the pardons isn’t specifically who is released from prison, but the meaning of Trump’s gesture: Radical militias are free to act with impunity — as long as they’re loyal to Trump,” wrote Ali Breland in The Atlantic. “After the riot, as law-enforcement agencies began to prosecute those involved, the militias went underground. Political violence, particularly by the right, has been ascendant over the past several years. Now, after the pardons, right-wing extremists no longer have to hide.”
In her book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, describes the binding of political violence to modern dictatorships, especially in fascist regimes dating to Mussolini’s organization of Fascist Combat Leagues in 1919. It began with assaults and murders on union leaders, socialists, and left-leaning priests in offices, homes, city occupations and ultimately a march on Rome by thousands of fascists and Blackshirt paramilitaries that led to his appointment as prime minister, in what Ben-Giatt called “an elite-approved transfer of power.”
“Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate,” driven by persuading “law and order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity” against disorder or provocation, wrote Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. “For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful,” he adds, a prescient prediction of Trump’s labeling January 6 a “day of love.”
With Trump’ pardons for January 6, suggested Ifil, “he wants to know he has a kind of army, a group of Brownshirts who will support him, who will show fealty to him to the point of violence,” referencing the most infamous linkage of political violence and fascism — Nazi Germany.
The rise of Hitler
In Hitler’s First Hundred Days, Peter Fritzsche describes the murderous connection. Hitler’s climb also coincided with the formation of a paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Brownshirts that carried out his ideological mission of revenge, including physical assaults on those he blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I, mainly Communists, the Social Democratic Party (a party similar to the centrist Democrats of today in the U.S.), and Jews.
Through street violence against his enemies, the Nazis and SA created an atmosphere of disruption and chaos that, accompanied by an economic collapse in a global depression, produced a desire for political change and distrust in democracy and traditional parties by ordinary Germans.
By 1932, the Nazis had become the top party in the parliamentary elections. But they were eroding support in January 1933 when the then-ruling rightwing nationalist, monarchist parties and leaders, like President Paul von Hindenburg, that also hated the left and Social Democrats, agreed to appoint Hitler chancellor. They believed it “was the only way to establish an authoritarian state” they also favored, writes Fritzsche, thinking they could control him, as many traditional Republicans believed of Trump prior to his first term. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. “It took a long, long time when Germany was already in ruins, for conservatives to understand that they had made a pact with the devil in 1933,” Fritzsche observes.
Like Mussolini before him, Hitler saw physical coercion as central to eliminating his political opposition and helping achieve acceptance of the then majority of non-Nazi supporting Germans. Almost immediately the Brownshirts escalated street attacks to “settle the score,” as one put it, on those deemed as, in words Trump would emulate in 2024, “the enemy from within.” In a February 1933 speech, Hitler declared, “there can be only one victor: either Marxism or the German Volk (people).”
“The Nazis won support because of their militance,” says Fritzsche. “By launching furious, uncompromising attacks on the ‘system’ and physically engaging their enemies, they dramatized the combustibility of the present. … and opened the way to the future. “I want no softies in my movement, I want fanatics,” Hitler told a reporter for the UK Daily Mail, yet another similarity to Trump’s opinion of conservatives, including his own Cabinet appointees, who failed to show unquestioned loyalty to him.
Just weeks after Hitler’s appointment, a massive fire consumed the Reichstag, Germany’s legislative building, akin to the U.S. Capitol. Hindenburg declared a state of emergency, convinced by Hitler and his rightwing coalition allies that Communists were to blame for the fire as a step toward insurrection, though many still believed the Nazis orchestrated it. The order “symbolized the death of representative government and the rule of law,” writes Fritzsche, followed by federal decrees that suspended civil liberties, expanded protective custody and sanctioned the removal of state governments.
The SA Brownshirts, who “sustained the extraordinary energy of the Nazi movement” were deputized by the government as auxiliary police. They now had unlimited power to break up opposition meetings, shut down opposition parties and newspapers, and assault political opponents. Thousands were arrested, mostly Communists initially, then Social Democratic leaders. Home raids, arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners and prolonged periods of incarceration created fear and widespread disquiet and reinforced a growing sense of national emergency especially heading into new elections in early March.
The violence coincided with other Nazis tactics to build their power in the election turning the election to a victory plebiscite. They exploited state resources, including domination of the media and national festivals, depicted their role as savior of the nation, and “presented themselves as the guardians of a sound moral order threatened by ‘Marxists’ and Jews’.” Immediately after the election, the SA “instigated a reign of terror wrecking trade union and Social Democratic offices, occupying city halls,” and escalated virulent attacks on Jewish shops, synagogues, and street beatings of individual Jews.
Emergency decrees, coercion, and consent
By Day 34 of Hitler’s reign, executive power passed almost completely into the hands of the Nazis, and enabled the Nazis to “consolidate one party rule.” The Communists were the first targets, “but all independent political organizations were eliminated or coordinated in the months to come,” Fritzsche notes.
Through the Spring of 1933, the Nazis engineered acceptance by a majority of the German people with a collective conformity, also based on opportunism, patriotic fervor and the far-right nationalist ideology they had long fostered, including racism and antisemitism.
Contrived fears that “the German people were about to perish” at the hands of Communists and Jews, offers a chilling parallel to the white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and Charlottesville neo-Nazi and KKK marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
“Coercion always accompanied consent,” says Fritzsche. Ben-Ghiat draws a similar outcome with fascist Spain under Gen. Francisco Franco, quoting philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset who said: “the threat in my mind of an eventual violence, coercion, or sanction that other people are going to exercise against me” bred conformity.
“Social Democrats believed they could not compete, they could pick up after the Nazis had bankrupted themselves and could act in the future, but not in the present. But the popularity of the Nazis was such that the future kept slipping away, and the pieces the socialists finally did pick up in the late 1940s were destroyed cities and millions murdered,” Fritzsche concludes.
That should be a warning to all elected officials, corporate CEOs, major media, community organizations and anyone else rolling over and seeking to align with Trump and his MAGA policies.
Hitler had no intention of giving up power. “I’m never leaving here” he said a week after moving into the chancellery. ”We have power and we’re going to keep it.” Top Nazi Hermann Goering echoed Hitler, predicting the March 5 election “would surely be the last for ten years or even a hundred years.”
“In four years, you don’t have to vote again,” Trump famously said to supporters last July. “Success is going to be retribution,” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio told conspiracy monger Alex Jones after his release. “We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure that the next four years sets us up for the next hundred years.”Keep ReadingShow Less
'Rewarding Political Violence,' Felon Trump Pardons Jan. 6 Insurrectionists
"This move not only erases accountability for one of the darkest days in our nation's history but also emboldens far-right extremists and grants them free license to continue their ideological reign of terror," said one critic.
Jan 20, 2025
Democracy defenders on Monday night swiftly condemned U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pardon roughly 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and commute the sentences of some others.
The widely anticipated move, which Trump made with television cameras in the Oval Office, came just hours after he returned to power on Monday afternoon—despite being convicted of 34 felonies in New York last year and facing various other legal cases, including for his attempts to overturn his 2020 loss to Democratic former President Joe Biden that culminated in inciting the 2021 Capitol attack.
"Just hours after promising to bring 'law and order back to our cities,' Trump pardoned more than a thousand January 6th rioters and put violent offenders right back in our neighborhoods—people who assaulted police officers, destroyed property, and tried to overturn our freedom to vote," said Sean Eldridge, president and founder of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, in a statement.
"By giving January 6th rioters a free pass, Trump is rewarding political violence and making all of us less safe," he continued. "No one should be above the law in the United States of America, and our first responders and the American people deserve better than this."
Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the grassroots progressive political organizing group Our Revolution, said that "Trump's pardons of January 6 rioters, including those convicted of violence against law enforcement, mark a grave and unprecedented attack on the rule of law and American democracy. This move not only erases accountability for one of the darkest days in our nation's history but also emboldens far-right extremists and grants them free license to continue their ideological reign of terror."
"These are not patriots, these are traitors who will now be free to recruit others into what Trump views as his own personal militia," he asserted. "By granting clemency to these individuals, who sought to overturn the peaceful transfer of power, Trump is signaling that political violence and the rejection of democratic norms are acceptable tactics in service to his authoritarian agenda. This is a direct threat to the foundations of our democracy and the safety of our communities."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of watchdog Public Citizen, said that "it is perhaps on-brand that Donald Trump has kicked off his second term with an assault on our democracy, just as he ended his first term."
"This isn't just about degrading the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law in theory, his disgraceful actions here send a message that political violence is acceptable, so long as it is in support of him and his pursuit of unchecked power," she continued. "We intend to fight against these types of abuses over the next four years to maintain the integrity of the rule of law."
Accusing the Republican of "condoning insurrection," Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón similarly warned that "this will not be the last time President Trump attacks democracy" and vowed that her organization stands "ready to defend it."
During the insurrection, Kase Solomón said, "people died and more than 140 law enforcement officers were injured protecting members of Congress from the attack that followed. These deaths and injuries should not be in vain. To pardon those involved is a blatant and dangerous abuse of power."
"Trump was charged with multiple crimes for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election which ended in the insurrection at the Capitol," she noted. "Only his reelection, coupled with an extremely misguided ruling from the Supreme Court on presidential immunity, allowed him to escape trial. In pardoning those who attempted to violently overturn the election and invalidate 80 million votes, Trump is showing his contempt for our justice system and our democracy."
Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor who is now president of the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, warned that "giving a pass to those who participated, all of whom were convicted after trial with ample evidence and process or pleaded guilty to crimes, sends a message that the right of the people to choose our own leaders no longer matters because the results can merely be overturned by force."
"And," he said, "it raises a terrifying question: What happens if Trump doesn't want to leave the White House at the end of his term?"
Trump commuted the sentences of Jeremy Bertino, Joseph Biggs, Thomas Caldwell, Joseph Hackett, Kenneth Harrelson, Kelly Meggs, Roberto Minuta, David Moerschel, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola, Zachary Rehl, Stewart Rhodes, Edward Vallejo, and Jessica Watkins. The others—whom Trump called "hostages"—received "a full, complete, and unconditional pardon."
"I further direct the attorney general to pursue dismissal with prejudice to the government of all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021," Trump's order said. "The Bureau of Prisons shall immediately implement all instructions from the Department of Justice regarding this directive."
Shortly before leaving office on Monday, Biden issued a final wave of pardons, including for members of the U.S. House of Representatives select committee that investigated the insurrection. The Democrat said that he could not "in good conscience do nothing" to protect them and the pardons "should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense."
This post has been updated with comment from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular