\n\tYou\u2019ve probably heard that cosplay Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been blowing up alleged drug running boats from Venezuela in extra-judicial killings that give new meaning to the phrase \u201cwar on drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tBut you might not have heard that his boss just pardoned<\/a> the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez, who was serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for abusing his office by leading what prosecutors called \u201cone of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIf the cognitive dissonance gives you whiplash, that\u2019s because you\u2019re paying attention.<\/p>\n \n\tFor a guy who talks a lot about how much he hates drugs \u2014 and is now floating it as a pretext for knocking off the odious Maduro regime \u2014 Trump has developed a strange habit<\/a> of giving pardons to drug dealers. A day after his latest inauguration, Trump pardoned the founder of the Silk Road website, which was notorious as a dark web drug den. This was followed by the strange commutation for the founder of the Gangster Disciples in Chicago, who flooded the Windy City with cocaine.<\/p>\n \n\tThis weirdness is part of a wider pattern. Because Trump has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations this year \u2014 10 times the number he pushed through in his entire first term.<\/p>\n \n\tThe presidential pardon is written into the Constitution, but Trump is not aiming for mercy or addressing objective injustices, as the founders intended.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHe is abusing the power to reward partisan political allies, enabling pay-for-pardon schemes, and attempting to decriminalize corruption.<\/p>\n \n\tRight out of the gate, Trump offered pardons to all the January 6 MAGA minions who attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. This list included violent individuals who assaulted police officers and those with criminal records<\/a>. Last month, he added blanket pardons<\/a> for the white-collar instigators and fake electors who advanced those election lies \u2014 including<\/a> his lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell. The rule of law doesn\u2019t apply to Trump loyalists.<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\tA boatload of connected big businessmen have also been getting presidential pardons. A former nursing home executive who was set to report to prison for tax crimes found himself off the hook after his mother attended a $1 million fundraiser for Trump that promised face-to-face access with the president. As The New York Times\u2019 Ken Vogel reported<\/a>, the curiously timed pardon spared Paul Walczak from \u201chaving to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence<\/a> that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there \u2018is not a get-out-of-jail-free card\u201d for the rich.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe judge spoke too soon. There are get-out-of-jail-free cards available to Trump supporters, for the right price.<\/p>\n \n\tThe CEO of the failed EV Truck company Nikola, a Utah billionaire named Trevor Milton, received a full pardon<\/a> after being convicted for defrauding investors. It was surely just a coincidence that Trevor Milton and his wife gave almost a million dollars each<\/a> to a Trump-backing Super PAC less than a month before the 2024 election. That\u2019s expensive but pardons are priceless.<\/p>\n \n\tMore notorious is the case of billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, dubbed \u201ccrypto\u2019s richest man,\u201d who had previously pleaded guilty<\/a> to money laundering that U.S. prosecutors said benefitted Hamas terrorists and Russian drug dealers. Zhao \u201crehabilitated\u201d himself by helping to boost the Trump family\u2019s crypto venture, which \u201craked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year \u2026 far more than the president\u2019s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually,\u201d according to The Wall Street Journal<\/a>. When Trump was asked about this shady pardon on 60 Minutes, he said he didn\u2019t know<\/a> who Zhao was.<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n \n\tBut perhaps the most consistent beneficiaries<\/a> of Trump\u2019s pardons and commutations have been corrupt politicians. This includes names associated with buffoonish corruption and fraud like George Santos, Rod Blagojevich, Michael Grimm, Duncan Hunter, and Duke Cunningham. It covers local elected Trump loyalists like Tennessee Statehouse Speaker Glenn Casada, who was convicted of fraud<\/a>, and Las Vegas City Councilwoman Michele Fiore, who was convicted<\/a> of using money raised for a memorial to slain police officers on personal expenses. As of this week you can add to this list conservative Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, who was indicted by the Biden Justice Department for accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil company and a Mexican bank.<\/p>\n \n\tThis list is exhausting but nowhere near exhaustive. Trump\u2019s pardon-palooza is not just fueled by his own bitterness at being America\u2019s first felon president, but also a desire for obsequious signs of fealty from the people he\u2019s let off the hook. Thanks to the Supreme Court\u2019s disastrous presidential immunity decision, there remains the specter of more pardons for anyone who puts loyalty to Trump ahead of loyalty to the Constitution.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThere is a sickening rationalization creeping across our nation which says that sucking up to Donald Trump<\/a> is just the cost of doing business in America at the moment. This decays the integrity of our democracy like acid.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhen this insane era is over, we will need reforms that rein in the power of the executive, because many of the unwritten guardrails were rooted in a belief that virtue and character would be a self-corrective. The founders apparently did not anticipate an era in which shamelessness was considered a political superpower.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThat\u2019s why we need to pursue reforms to stop the abuse of the pardon power. A constitutional amendment is the biggest lift, though both parties have howled at past pardons from opposition presidents. Representative Steve Cohen has put forward an amendment <\/a>that would \u201cclarify and limit\u201d presidential pardons,\u00a0 prohibiting self-pardons and pardons for actions that personally benefit the president or for crimes committed with a president. Sounds common sense enough even though the two-thirds threshold seems insurmountable in our stupid hyper-partisan era.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n \n\tA more achievable approach could be pursued through Congress, where a bill called the Abuse of Power Prevention Act<\/a> would require that the Department of Justice and the president turn over details about the crimes and explain the pardon rationale to Congress, making it clear that the bribery statute applies to presidential pardons while also barring self-pardons. The website Just Security has a good write up<\/a> about these options.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tTrump\u2019s pardon spree is a daily scandal that is deforming the norms of our democracy. But populist anger over corruption is historically one of the forces that takes down would-be autocrats. People understand that corruption is fundamentally unfair as long as they understand how it affects their lives. So as you take in this list, just remember this: The rich, connected, and powerful are getting out of jail free cards under President Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019ve probably heard that cosplay Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been blowing up alleged drug running boats from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,12,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-331885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-donald-trump","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}