A Year Under Review: Examining Trump’s Use of Clemency Throughout His Second Term

Trump is holding up a presidential proclamation he signed on the first day of his second term, January 20, 2025. The document Trump is holding is numbered Proclamation 10887 and titled “Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Events at or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” It lists the names of 14 people whose sentences are to be commuted and orders a blanket pardon for all others convicted of crimes related to that event. It also instructs the Department of Justice to cease any ongoing prosecutions of January 6-related offenses. The photograph was taken in the Oval Office and is from an official White House tweet.

Throughout the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump has already granted over 1,700 pardons and commutations, the vast majority of which were issued on his inauguration day for those charged with crimes related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Given the comparatively high number, questions have been raised about the integrity and purpose of these acts of clemency. Since clemency is a power the president wields without constraint, examining whom they choose to grant this mercy to reveals where their priorities and empathy lie. 

Of the 1,500 individuals who were included in the January 6 blanket pardon, 417 were charged with violence or assault of an officer, 238 were charged with carrying deadly or dangerous weapons, including 12 cases involving unlawful possession of firearms. An additional 17 individuals were charged with seditious conspiracy, a serious federal offense involving two or more people plotting to overthrow or interfere with the government by violent force. 

“[Blanket pardons have] happened before, but never really with this category of violent offenders,” said Mark W. Osler, former federal prosecutor and current law professor at the University of St. Thomas, in an interview on presidential clemency. 

Despite the severity of many of these charges, Trump’s rhetoric consistently describes those charged with crimes related to January 6 as victims rather than perpetrators. He referred to them as “great patriots” and “hostages,” and in a Fox News interview defended their actions by saying, “They were protesting the vote…because they knew the election was rigged,” arguing that these types of protests should be protected. 

However, the scale of the pardons raises questions about how carefully individual cases were reviewed. Trump acknowledged that evaluating each case individually would have been difficult, stating, “It would be very, very cumbersome to go and look — you know how many people we’re talking about? 1500 people.” 

One of the most prominent recipients of these pardons was Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right militia group Oath Keepers. Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in prison after it was found that he was plotting “for weeks if not months” to overturn the 2020 election. During his case, Judge Amit Mehta applied a terrorism enhancement to his charges and called him “an ongoing threat” to the United States. Despite these findings, Rhodes became a free man on January 21, 2025, after serving only 3 years. 

Several other January 6 recipients had previous criminal records or were later arrested for other serious offenses. Theodore Middendorf, for example, would not have gotten much out of an act of clemency for his involvement in January 6, considering he was facing a 19-year sentence for a child rape he was convicted of in 2024. He got a full pardon from Mr. Trump anyway. Matthew Huttle, who had a previous criminal record including child abuse, was fatally shot by police for ignoring orders and pulling a gun on officers just days after receiving his pardon.

While Osler indicated that there is no universal formula for granting clemency, noting that each president has different values and empathizes with different people, he also mentioned that every case “needs to be thoroughly vetted” and that clemency should be limited to “people that we think are going to be safe.” The January 6 cases illustrate the risks of issuing broad clemency without extensive review. While former President Trump characterized many of these individuals as victims of political persecution, court records and subsequent events indicate that several of them pose continued threats to public safety. 

Trump’s attitude toward other protest movements that don’t align with him politically marks a complete departure from this sympathy and victimization. He has frequently labeled Black Lives Matter protestors as “thugs” and those protesting ICE as “insurrectionists” and “agitators”, with others from his administration going so far as to call them domestic terrorists. In other cases, such as the shooting of Alex Pretti, who was legally carrying a firearm and was not engaged in violence, Trump argued that he shouldn’t have had a gun at all. 

On December 1, 2025, Trump pardoned Juan Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, for conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States. This pardon is especially striking given that Trump has made the cessation of drug cartels one of his core missions, even stating that he would approve of “kill[ing] people that bring drugs into our country.” Around the same time that Nicolas Maduro was seized by US forces in an effort to “end his campaign of deadly narco-terrorism,” Hernandez was granted a pardon despite having accepted bribes to facilitate the flow of roughly 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. 

So why was Hernandez granted a pardon? He sent the president a 4-page letter in which he expressed strong admiration for Trump, claiming, “Just as you, President Trump, I have suffered political persecution, targeted by the Biden-Harris administration not for any wrongdoing, but for political reasons,” which seems to have been enough to secure the President’s support. When reporters asked Trump about the situation, he merely stated that it was a “Biden administration set-up,” offering no actual evidence that Hernandez was wrongly convicted.

Similarly, Trump pardoned Ross William Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road, an online dark-market platform that facilitated drug trafficking, hacking, fraud, and money laundering through cryptocurrency, saying that “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me.”

Together, these cases reveal an inconsistency in how Trump responds to crime and dissent. His own explanations for the pardons show a selective view of justice. He appears less concerned with the crimes themselves than with political loyalty and whether the individuals reinforce his narrative of persecution and martyrdom. 

However, multiple other factors also come into play. According to Osler, “[some] thing that’s unusual with Trump] is [the pardons] are almost all going to people who are wealthy, powerful, connected, or all three.” 

An overwhelming amount of other pardons issued by Trump were for white-collar crimes committed by already successful figures who were financially loyal to Trump. 

Terren Peizer, the former CEO of Ontrak, received clemency after being sentenced to 42 months in prison and fined $5 million for securities fraud and insider trading, while Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola Corporation, was pardoned following a 48-month sentence on three counts of fraud.

Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of Binance and one of the wealthiest people in the world, was sentenced to 4 months in prison and fined $50 million for failing to maintain an adequate anti-money laundering program. Healthcare executive Paul Walczak was pardoned after being convicted of withholding roughly $10 million in employee payroll taxes and using the funds for personal luxury purchases rather than remitting them to the IRS.

The common thread tying these cases together, apart from the excessive fraud, is that all of these people either donated to Trump’s campaign, publicly supported him, or were closely connected with him. For example, Paul Walczak’s pardon application, which emphasized his mother’s unwavering support and generous donations to Trump, reportedly went unnoticed by Trump for months until she was invited to a $1 million-per-guest fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where she had direct access to the President. Weeks later, Walczak was released.

Trevor Milton had donated almost $1 million to Trump’s political efforts. Binance, led by Changpeng Zhao, was reported to have significant financial ties to the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.

Additionally, Osler told me that clemency “needs to reward rehabilitation.” However, many of the people who received Trump pardons served only a small fraction of their sentences, if any at all. “Because there’s some remarkable stories out there of people who have been in prison for 25 years, have really changed themselves, and they don’t have a chance because some crypto guy who hasn’t even been sentenced yet is getting a pardon.”

It is worth noting that Mr. Trump is not the only president to have engaged in ethically ambiguous acts of clemency, and some of the blame may fall on the system as a whole.

“For the past forty years,” Osler says, “[pardons have] been vetted through an office way deep in the Department of Justice, and then [they] filter [their] way up several layers of bureaucracy to the President. And that’s been a not very good process. Because it’s bureaucratic, it’s slow, it’s inefficient. It weeds out a lot of people it shouldn’t,” Olser adds, “presidents, instead, they hear from their friends, and they make decisions based on that. And that was true of Clinton, it was true of Bush to some degree, Obama less, but Biden definitely, and Trump, almost completely.”

“At the federal level, it would be great if they moved towards a process like a lot of the states have, where you have a commission that’s going to advise the President, as opposed to the Department of Justice.”

Many states, including New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Ohio, have introduced clemency advisory boards, which offer a more structured and efficient way for clemency petitions to reach the governor’s desk. These boards are made up of experts from many backgrounds and serve as an independent body to make the clemency process more transparent, direct, and accessible to more cases.

The pardon power was designed as a mechanism of mercy. It is meant to grant those deserving of one a second chance at freedom when the courts fail them. But when exercised with bias and without meaningful review, it can just as easily reflect favoritism and political grievances, while overlooking individuals who could really benefit from mercy. To achieve the greatest possible outreach within this power, reform may be necessary to ensure clemency is guided by principle rather than proximity to power.