{"id":46714,"date":"2025-11-10T16:54:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T16:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/46714\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T16:54:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T16:54:14","slug":"trump-pardons-allies-accused-of-aiding-efforts-to-overturn-2020-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/46714\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump pardons allies accused of aiding efforts to overturn 2020 election"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak at a meeting of the House GOP conference, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington. (File photo by Alex Brandon\/Associated Press)<\/p>\n

\u00a0President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer\u00a0Rudy Giuliani<\/a>, his onetime chief of staff\u00a0Mark Meadows<\/a>\u00a0and others accused of backing the Republican\u2019s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

The \u201cfull, complete, and unconditional\u201d pardon applies only to federal crimes, and none of the dozens of Trump allies named in the proclamation were ever charged federally over the bid to subvert the election won by Democrat Joe Biden. It doesn\u2019t impact state charges, though state prosecutions stemming from the 2020 election\u00a0have hit a dead end or are just limping along<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The move, however, underscores Trump\u2019s continued efforts to promote\u00a0the idea that the 2020 election was stolen<\/a>\u00a0from him even though\u00a0courts around the country<\/a>and U.S. officials found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome. It follows the sweeping pardons of the hundreds of\u00a0Trump supporters charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot<\/a>\u00a0at the U.S. Capitol, including those convicted of attacking law enforcement.<\/p>\n

Among those also pardoned were\u00a0Sidney Powell<\/a>, an attorney who promoted\u00a0baseless conspiracy theories<\/a>\u00a0about a stolen election,\u00a0John Eastman<\/a>, another lawyer who\u00a0pushed a plan to keep<\/a>\u00a0Trump in power, and\u00a0Jeffrey Clark<\/a>, a former Justice Department official who championed Trump\u2019s efforts to challenge his election loss. <\/p>\n

Also named were Republicans who acted as\u00a0fake electors<\/a>\u00a0for Trump and were charged in state cases accusing them of submitting false certificates that confirmed they were legitimate electors despite Biden\u2019s victory in those states.<\/p>\n

The proclamation, posted online late Sunday by pardon attorney Ed Martin, explicitly says the pardon does not apply to the president himself.<\/p>\n

The pardon described efforts to prosecute the Trump allies as \u201ca grave national injustice perpetrated on the American people\u201d and said the pardons were designed to continue \u201cthe process of national reconciliation.\u201d Giuliani and others have denied any wrongdoing, arguing they were simply challenging an election they believed was tainted by fraud.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese great Americans were persecuted and put through hell by the Biden Administration for challenging an election, which is the cornerstone of democracy,\u201d White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an emailed statement.<\/p>\n

Those pardoned were not prosecuted by the Biden administration, however. They were charged only by state prosecutors who operate separately from the Justice Department.<\/p>\n

Trump himself was indicted on federal\u00a0felony charges<\/a>\u00a0accusing him of working overturn his 2020 election defeat, but the case brought by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith\u00a0was abandoned<\/a>\u00a0in November after Trump\u2019s victory over Democrat Kamala Harris because of the department\u2019s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. Giuliani, Powell, Eastman and Clark were alleged co-conspirators in the federal case brought against Trump but were never charged with federal crimes.<\/p>\n

Giuliani, Meadows and others named in the proclamation had been charged by prosecutors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin over the 2020 election, but the cases\u00a0have repeatedly hit roadblocks<\/a>\u00a0or have been dismissed. A judge in September dismissed the Michigan case against 15 Republicans accused of attempting to falsely certify Trump as the winner of the election in that battleground state.<\/p>\n

Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, was one of the most vocal supporters of\u00a0Trump\u2019s unsubstantiated claims<\/a>\u00a0of large-scale voter fraud after the 2020 election. He has since\u00a0been disbarred<\/a>\u00a0in Washington, D.C., and New York over his advocacy of Trump\u2019s bogus election claims and\u00a0lost a $148 million defamation case<\/a>\u00a0brought by two former Georgia election workers whose lives were upended by conspiracy theories he pushed.<\/p>\n

Eastman, a former dean of Chapman University Law School in Southern California, was a close adviser to Trump in the wake of the 2020 election and wrote a memo laying out\u00a0steps Vice President Mike Pence could take<\/a>\u00a0to stop the counting of electoral votes while presiding over Congress\u2019 joint session on Jan. 6 to keep Trump in office.<\/p>\n

Clark, who is now overseeing a federal regulatory office, also is\u00a0facing possible disbarment<\/a>\u00a0in Washington over his advocacy of Trump\u2019s claims. Clark clashed with Justice Department superiors over letter he drafted after the 2020 election that said the department was investigating \u201cvarious irregularities\u201d and had identified \u201csignificant concerns\u201d that may have impacted the election in Georgia and other states. Clark wanted the letter sent to Georgia lawmakers, but top Justice Department officials refused.<\/p>\n

Clark said in a social media post on Monday that he \u201cdid nothing wrong\u201d and \u201cshouldn\u2019t have had to battle this witch hunt for 4+ years.\u201d<\/p>\n

READ NEXT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak at a meeting of the House GOP conference, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[30696,30697,74,76,75,30698,1695],"class_list":{"0":"post-46714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-john-eastman","9":"tag-pardons","10":"tag-san-diego","11":"tag-san-diego-headlines","12":"tag-san-diego-news","13":"tag-sidney-powell","14":"tag-trump-administration"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}