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pardons
Trump Pardons His Co-Conspirators in 2020 Coup Attempt
One policy expert warned the move was likely meant to signal to Republican election officials that if they take actions to steal future elections, "they'll be pardoned."
Nov 10, 2025
President Donald Trump has given a "full, complete, and unconditional” pardon to a long list of allies who conspired to help him overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
Late Sunday night, Justice Department attorney Ed Martin posted a list of over 70 people who would receive pardons. Many of the figures included were named as unindicted co-conspirators or charged at the state level for their roles in the plot to knowingly spread false claims of widespread voter fraud in an attempt to push states to reject former President Joe Biden's victories in key swing states and pressure Vice President Mike Pence into stopping the certification of the election.
Among those pardoned are Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who publicly promoted baseless claims of a vast conspiracy against the president to the public, claiming that the election was stolen by a cabal of foreign infiltrators and scheming election officials. They later faced defamation lawsuits for these claims, and in legal proceedings, Giuliani conceded he made false statements about election workers, while Powell's lawyers argued that "no reasonable person" would conclude her public claims were statements of fact.
Trump also pardoned former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who acted as a facilitator between the president and state officials he attempted to bully into saying he won the election. Aside from the president himself, Meadows was the highest-ranking White House staffer on the phone call in which Trump asked Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" him enough votes to be declared the winner of the election.
Also receiving pardons were attorneys John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro. They were part of what Pence called Trump's "gaggle of crackpot lawyers," who concocted the tortured legal theory that the vice president could declare Biden's victory in swing states illegitimate and anoint Trump as the winner. Eastman privately admitted to Trump that the scheme was illegal but pressed ahead with it anyway, culminating in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, during which Trump supporters chanted, "Hang Mike Pence," and tried to stop the election results from being certified.
Also pardoned were several of the right-wing activists who signed documents falsely claiming to be electors from states that had certified the election for Biden.
Crucially, the individuals listed never faced federal criminal indictments for their election subversion attempts. However, dozens of those on the list were charged with crimes in swing states—including Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada—related to the effort. The pardons mean these officials cannot be indicted at the federal level for these crimes.
Though the pardon list is broad, giving clemency to "all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting activities, participation in or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of presidential electors… as well for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 presidential election," it explicitly states that it "does not apply" to Trump himself, indicating that his legal team is not yet ready to test the theory that the president can pardon himself.
Still, the language Martin used in the announcement—"No MAGA left behind"—signaled the goal of creating a two-tiered justice system where those who display loyalty to Trump are immune from the law.
"The stated goal of the pardon attorney is to reward the president's political supporters," wrote Matt Gertz, a senior fellow for Media Matters for America on social media.
It coincides with Trump's broader efforts to give get-out-of-jail-free cards to anyone who gives him political support. Immediately after returning to office, he gave blanket pardons to more than 1,500 people who participated in the violent effort to overturn the election on his behalf on January 6. Since then, his Justice Department has moved to fire or suspend those who brought cases against them, even for unrelated crimes.
Simply being a public Trump supporter has often been enough for people to be let off the hook for petty crimes. Florida healthcare executive Paul Walczak, who was convicted of federal tax evasion, reportedly got a pardon after his mother made a substantial donation to Trump's Super PAC. He later gave pardons to reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, a pair of vocal supporters, who were convicted of bank and tax fraud. He also pardoned Virginia Sheriff Scott Jenkins, another prominent supporter, who was convicted in a bribery scandal for accepting "cash for badges."
"Pardon attorney Ed Martin explicitly linked the pardons to his 'No MAGA left behind' mantra—tweeting the news in reply to a post that said exactly that," noted senior Lawfare editor Anna Bower. "Ironically, Martin also leads the Weaponization Working Group, which probes alleged 'politicization' of the Justice Department."
Tyson Slocum, an energy policy expert at Public Citizen, warned that these pardons send a clear message to those hoping to help Trump subvert future elections.
"Trump's pardons of Republicans who have committed crimes," he said, "is a setup to encourage state-level Republican election officials to take actions to illegally steal the election, knowing that if they succeed, they'll be pardoned."
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'Another Corrupt Pardon': Trump Pardons Reality TV Stars Convicted of Tax Evasion and Bank Fraud
"It appears Trump is no longer concerned about appearances or the pretense of propriety. He's corrupting the pardon process," wrote one MSNBC political contributor on Tuesday.
May 28, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday reportedly signed full pardons for Todd and Julie Chrisley, reality TV stars known for the program "Chrisley Knows Best," who were convicted in 2022 of evading taxes and financial fraud to prop up their luxurious lifestyles.
Todd and Julie Chrisley were sentenced to 12 and seven years in federal prison, respectively, in 2022. The charges brought against them included conspiring to defraud banks in the Atlanta area in order to get ahold of over $36 million in personal loans. "The Chrisleys spent the money on luxury cars, designer clothes, real estate, and travel—and used new fraudulent loans to pay back old ones," according to a 2022 release from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia. Both of the Chrisleys have maintained their innocence, according to CNN.
Citing an unnamed White House official, CNN reported Wednesday that Trump has signed pardons for them, though as of mid-day the pardons are still not listed on the Department of Justice's website.
On Tuesday, Trump's communications adviser, Margo Martin, posted a video on X that showed Trump making a phone call to the Chrisleys' daughter, Savannah Chrisley, letting her know of his plans to grant pardons for her parents. In the video, Trump says that "it's a great thing because your parents are going to be free and clean, and hopefully we can do it by tomorrow."
Reacting to the news about the Chrisleys, Steve Benen, an MSNBC political contributor and producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," argued on Wednesday that in his first term, Trump "wielded his pardon power as a corrupt weapon," but many of his eye-brow raising pardon actions took place after he lost in the 2020 election.
"But as his second term gets underway, it appears Trump is no longer concerned about appearances or the pretense of propriety. He's corrupting the pardon process; he knows that he's corrupting the pardon process; he knows that we know that he's corrupting the pardon process; and he's doing it anyway," Benen wrote. "The president seems eager to act with impunity, confident in the knowledge that a Republican-led Congress will shrug its shoulders with indifference."
The X account Republicans against Trump blasted the move on Tuesday, calling it "another corrupt pardon."
Trump began his second term with multiple high-profile 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.
More recently, Trump in April pardoned Florida healthcare executive Paul Walczak, who was recently sentenced to over a year in prison stemming from tax crimes that he pleaded guilty to.
In Walczak's pardon application, submitted last fall, he argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother's support of Trump, including her financial support for Trump's campaigns, rather than the crimes he had admitted to, according to The New York Times. The outlet also reported that Walczak's mother, Elizabeth Fago, attended a fundraiser at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club last month that was a $1-million-per-person dinner. Weeks later, Trump pardoned Walczak.
Savannah Chrisley has spoken publicly to highlight her parents' case.
Savannah Chrisley spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024 and suggested that her parents were targeted because prosecutors had some sort of political agenda. "My family was persecuted by rogue prosecutors in Fulton County due to our public profile—I know, Fulton County, they know how to do it, don't they—due to our public profile and conservative beliefs," Chrisley said. According to The Washington Post, she also went to the White House in February to make the case for their pardons.
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Criminal Corporations Are Not People, But Trump Just Pardoned One Anyway
"If you're a corporation in a favored industry, you can break the law. You can get caught. You can be prosecuted and sentenced with a $100 million fine, and it doesn't matter," said one consumer advocate.
Apr 03, 2025
In what could be a U.S. first, President Donald Trump last week pardoned a criminal corporation, a move that largely flew under the proverbial radar amid his pardon spree for white-collar criminals including at least one of his supporters.
On March 28, Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX; company co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed; and former business development chief Gregory Dwyer.
The company and the four men hads each pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act "by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an adequate" anti-money laundering program, as required by law. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice sentenced BitMEX to a fine of $100 million, while the executives were sentenced to criminal probation and ordered to pay civil fines.
While experts noted that Trump acted within his rights to pardon the corporation, there is no known precedent for a president taking such action.
Trump's corporate pardon sends a clear message: “If you’re a corporation in a favored industry, you can break the law. You can get caught. You can be prosecuted and sentenced with a $100 million fine, and it doesn’t matter”
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— Rick Claypool (@rickclaypool.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 7:18 AM
Noting the U.S. Supreme Court's highly controversial 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—which affirmed corporate personhood and the dubious notion that unlimited outside spending on political campaigns is free speech—Stanford Law School professor Bernadette Meyler told The Intercept that "while we have seen the rise of a trend of treating corporations as persons in other areas of law, we haven't seen that so far in the area of pardoning."
Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and preeminent pardons expert, wrote for The Hill on Tuesday that the BitMEX pardons send the message that "companies involved in financial crimes don't have to worry about accountability under this president, as least when it comes to crypto, for reasons that he has no incentive to ever make known."
"BitMEX can continue its prior criminal practices with federal impunity, and maybe even rely on the pardon to thwart future investigations into related conduct by federal lawmakers or state prosecutors," Wehle added. "The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people, including the more than 77 million who might finally be realizing that they voted for lawlessness last November."
"The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people."
Brandon Garrett, a Duke University law professor specializing in corporate crime and punishment, told The Intercept that the BitMEX pardons are part of a wider pattern of impunity under Trump, who "now seems to be systematically pardoning corporate malefactors left and right without respect, really, to any real serious consideration about the merits of the cases [or] the larger policy implications of issuing these pardons."
As the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen recently noted, "The Trump administration has dropped, withdrawn, or halted investigations and enforcement actions against over 100 corporations in its first two months in office."
Beneficiaries include companies owned or led by Trump donors or allies, including private prison giant GEO Group; Zelle network banks JPMorgan and Bank of America; crypto firms Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, OpenSea, Ripple, and Robinhood; and Elon Musk's SpaceX.
"Trump's corporate pardons show the president's true base is the billionaire executives and corporate elites lining up to indulge their greed at the trough of Trump's corruption," Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool said last week. "Trump's soft-on-corporate crime approach invites a corporate crime spree and potentially catastrophic abuses for America's consumers, workers, and communities."
Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman added that the Trump administration's "effective no-enforcement policy against corporations virtually guarantees more financial scams, more workplace discrimination, more poisoning of the air and water, more food contamination, more fraud, more disease, and more preventable death."
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