Trump Grossly Abuses His Pardon Powers, Harms Victims

Donald Trump is not just working to avoid accountability for himself and his backers. He is trying to erase crimes from history.

On Tuesday, Trump’s Justice Department filed a request with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals asking it to throw out the convictions of leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who had been found guilty of seditious conspiracy related to the January 6 mob attack on the Capitol.

Trump had already commuted these leaders’ sentences on his first day in office. Now he wants to completely erase their felony convictions – the most serious crimes prosecuted for the January 6 coup attempt.

The effort to eliminate any criminal record for the convicted Proud Boys and Oath Keepers is a desperate attempt to rewrite history. But Trump fails to understand that historians, not participants, write history.

Last Friday, Trump stated, and not for the first time, that he would provide mass pardons for his top administration officials at the end of his term. This gives blank checks to top administration officials to break the law at will and avoid accountability.

Trump himself is already the beneficiary of presidential immunity for criminal activity, the result of the disastrous 2024 Supreme Court decision that gave Trump immunity for actions taken within the “outer perimeter of official responsibilities.” The Court gave him a license to be lawless.

Grossly abusing the presidential pardon

Trump has egregiously abused his pardon powers since the day he took office, often at the financial expense of the criminals’ victims.

This started when he granted pardons and some commutations of sentences to nearly 1,600 people involved in the January 6 mob attack on the Capitol. Among the pardoned insurrectionists were many individuals who had attacked and injured 140 police officers. That didn’t matter to Trump.

One way to understand Trump’s pardon motivations is captured by the clemency Trump gave to former Representative George Santos. Trump granted Santos a release from prison three months into a seven-year sentence and explained: “He lied like hell. And I didn’t know him, but he was 100 percent for Trump.”

Another way is to look at Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange. The pardon for Zhao came after Binance had been very helpful to World Liberty Financial, the crypto enterprise run by Trump’s family. Since the Zhao pardon, the relationship between Binance and World Liberty has only gotten stronger.

Yet another way to understand Trump’s pardon motivation involves Paul Walczak who pocketed $10 million from his employees” paychecks. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution. Walczak’s mother donated $1 million to a Trump Mar-a-Lago fundraiser and lo and behold her son received a pardon and his restitution was eliminated.

Or there’s the case of Trevor Milton, the CEO of Nikola Motors, who had more than $650 million in restitution wiped away when his fraud conviction was pardoned by Trump. Milton and his wife just happened to donate $1.8 million to support Trump’s re-election shortly before the 2024 election. And one of Milton’s attorneys just happened to be Brad Bondi, brother of the then Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Devon Archer and Jason Galanis were each convicted of defrauding the Oglala Sioux Nation of tens of millions of dollars. Archer was ordered to pay nearly $60 million in forfeiture and restitution and Galanos was ordered to pay $80 million in restitution.

Archer and Galanis later testified, in the House and from prison respectively, against their former business partner Hunter Biden in a House impeachment inquiry entitled “Influence Peddling: Examining Joe Biden’s Abuse of Public Office.” (The hearings went nowhere.)

Lo and behold Archer was later pardoned and Galanis had his sentence commuted, and the forfeiture order and restitutions were wiped out.

And it goes on and on. The pattern is consistent. Reward Trump in one way or another and Trump rewards you – with pardons and commutations.

As of January 2026, more than half of the pardons went to individuals guilty of white-collar crimes, including money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud, according to NBC News. Included in the pardons are an unusually high number of wealthy people convicted of financial crimes.

The scale of Trump’s “rewards” is staggering. According to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, by June 2025, Trump’s pardons and commutations had wiped out an estimated $1.3 billion in restitution payments and fines owed to victims and taxpayers.

The pardon power exists to correct injustices, not to reward backers. Trump’s fundamental distortion and abuse of that power have greatly damaged victims, the justice system and the rule of law.

For all he has done to control the narrative, when Trump leaves office on January 20, 2029, many will start working immediately to erase every possible trace of his presidency.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears on Thursdays in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter, and other recent editions, here. And subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.