Want a Pardon? Sweet-Talk Trump
Criminal politicians praise the president in hopes he’ll hand them ‘get out of jail free’ cards.
A bit of breaking news to start us off today: President Donald Trump likes it when nice things are said about him. He doesn’t discriminate in that area, either, welcoming all praise that any human being sends his way. Flattery will often induce him to reward his flatterers, including by granting clemency to numerous corrupt politicians who’ve continued to sing his praises even from behind bars.
When Trump commuted the sentence of flamboyant fraudster and former New York Rep. George Santos on Friday, it was the tenth time he granted mercy to a criminal Republican who formerly served in the United States House of Representatives.
“Thank you to President Trump for clemency, and for having such an amazing will for second chances,” Santos said in a Fox News interview upon his release. “I feel like it’s justice served in a sense of, I’ve made some poor choices in my life, but nothing would warrant an insane, arbitrary sentence, but on top of that, a sentence that no one else would have gotten. A treatment that no one else would’ve gotten.”1
In his first term, Trump pardoned six former House Republicans and commuted the sentence of a seventh, former Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas). Since the start of his second term, Trump has commuted Santos’s sentence, pardoned former governor (and former congressman) John Rowland (R-Conn.), and pardoned former Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.). In addition, during both his terms in office, Trump has offered clemency to a host of other convicted wrongdoers including corporate schemers, cop beaters,2 seditionists, and Jared Kushner’s dad, Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to paying a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, paying a private investigator to film the encounter, and then sending his sister the tape to get revenge on his brother-in-law for cooperating with an investigation into Charles Kushner’s other crimes.
The one thing all these recipients of political mercy have in common was their personal loyalty to Trump. For all of Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric, the president has overtopped Washington’s levees with corruption and offered leniency to any of his allies who happened to get caught playing in the muck.
When I asked Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, about Trump’s approach to clemency, he said, “I don’t know how you can argue” with the president’s pardon powers in the Constitution. When I clarified that I’m aware of pardon authority but was merely asking if he thinks there are ethical issues with frequently letting corrupt politicians off the hook, Grassley said, “I only know about the Santos one, and I wouldn’t know how to comment on that.”
Grassley’s response to the president’s habit of getting criminal politicians out of jail—that it is just a routine exercise of authority that stands above any kind of moral judgment—is pretty common among Republicans on Capitol Hill. Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), one of the Republicans who led the effort to oust Santos, told CNN that “three months is not enough of a sentence for all the crimes he committed.” But he added that Santos himself—not the clemency given to him—is a “distraction” from “President Trump’s awesome accomplishments” during his second term.
Trump is aware that high-status criminals regard him as someone worth aggressively lobbying for pardons and other forms of clemency. In the Oval Office earlier this month, the president told reporters he’s frequently asked to spring people from the clink, including ostensibly non-political folks like Sean “P Diddy” Combs.
“A lot of people have asked me for pardons,” Trump said. “I call him Puff Daddy; [he] has asked me for a pardon.”
When the campaign to free Santos started up over the summer, Trump gave a sign that the former representative might be in his good graces even though he hadn’t yet reached out to the president. “He lied like hell,” Trump said in a Newsmax interview in August, “and I didn’t know him, but he was 100 percent for Trump.” By the time the commutation was reported, Trump had updated his language: Santos was no longer a liar but a “rogue” and even “a Great Hero.”
Not all of the criminals looking for a way out were savvy enough to publicly praise Trump before getting locked up, but they are still keeping the fire of hope alive in their hearts. Many have pivoted to effusive support of the MAGA movement as a tactic for eliciting Trump’s favor. Former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who is serving jail time for accepting bribes and obstruction of justice, cast himself as a Trump-like victim of a vindictive justice system in a January statement. “President Trump is right,” Menendez declared. “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.” He’s still waiting to hear back on that.
Right-wing activist and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon bragged about helping secure an early prison release for confessed mafia hitman Vito Guzzo because he is “the single biggest Trump fan you’ve ever seen.”
Even those without leverage have hitched a ride on the Trump train to achieve freedom. Sam Bankman-Fried, the imprisoned cryptocurrency mogul, mounted a campaign to lobby Trump for a pardon. Torence Ivy Hatch Jr., known by his rap name Boosie BadAzz, hired the Trump-friendly hucksters Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl to advocate for a pardon, according to a recent lobbying disclosure. And the clemency-advocacy business is booming. Burkman and Wohl have several other clients with criminal records, including financial fraudsters and medical malpractitioners, although so far Hatch appears to be the only Burkman/Wohl client whose contract specifies pardon advocacy, according to lobbying disclosures.
Meanwhile, Democrats view the spate of pardons and commutations as an effort to negate the justice system for certain corrupt politicians. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me, “Right now we have to see how this is playing into the destruction of the rule of law. I think this has made it clear that pardon power is too big and too broad and [does] not [have] enough checks.”
“But we’re not changing [the president’s pardon ability] between now and the potential expiration date of our democracy,” he added.
The CR is a yellowing banana
The government shutdown is now twenty-one days old. In another two weeks, it will eclipse the longest shutdown in U.S. history, which also happened during the first Trump administration, starting in late 2018 and ending in early 2019. But the continuing resolution to temporarily fund the government—you know, the one that passed in the House only for Senate Republicans to have forced eleven failed votes on it so far this month? That CR is rapidly losing its value.
If signed into law, the CR would only keep the government open until November 21, which is now just a month away. That means that even if the CR were magically passed in the Senate tomorrow, any new deal to fund government operations would need to be hammered out in a matter of weeks to prevent yet another shutdown.
“The appropriators have been doing great work,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Monday. “They’re continuing to work, even during the shutdown. They’re working individually, and on their subcommittees, and among themselves, and even across the aisle to get the next batch of appropriations bills ready for passage. Is the time eroding quickly? Yes.”
The shutdown will continue as long as there is no good-faith negotiation. The limited conversations about funding that are taking place in the Senate—and, to a much lesser extent, in the House—will need to dramatically change to more directly address the next funding deal if progress on the current one isn’t made in the next week or so. I wouldn’t bet on a deal coming to fruition before that happens.
The Monster of Florence
A new miniseries premieres on Netflix tomorrow about the serial killer known as the “Monster of Florence.” The show stars Italian actors and is entirely in Italian, so if that’s not your thing, I want to recommend a book based on the killings and investigations that I loved reading a few years ago.
The 2008 bestseller The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi offers a detailed account of a string of gruesome murders of Italian teens in their cars during the 1960s and 1980s and the investigations that followed. In my view, the real value of the story is in the way it anticipates the wild spread of conspiracies like QAnon that plague contemporary society.
Preston is a novelist and journalist who moved to Italy only to learn that his new home was once the scene of one of the murders. His coauthor, Spezi, was a leading journalist in Italy who was once thrown in prison while reporting on the car killings. The authors identify the individual they believe to have been the real killer, and along the way, they offer frankly alarming accounts of the haphazard and conspiratorial Italian justice system, where a deeply rooted belief that the killings were the work of a satanic cult obstructed various attempts to apprehend the perpetrator (or perpetrators). The man Preston and Spezi believe to have done the killings fled the country long ago.
If you end up watching the miniseries (with or without subtitles) or read the book, drop me a note in English or Italiano. I’d love to hear your reactions.
Santos also announced he’s leaving New York for a new state. If he follows the latest trend, we can map out his next few steps with a high degree of detail: That new state will be Florida, and Santos will mount another run for Congress in the state’s 19th Congressional District.
Grassley has destroyed federal law enforcement by approving the most incompetent, corrupt leaders in DOJ/FBI. Meanwhile his hero taco has cost his Iowa farmers 32 billion with his tariffs on China.
We can only hope the statute of limitations hasn't run out on some of these people and the states can go after them