The Pardon Pen as a Favor Factory: Now Serving Number 1,600

FACT: On January 20, 2025 — before the first day was even over — Trump erased the entire Capitol-attack prosecution, pardoning roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants and commuting 14 more. The clemency covered ten people convicted of seditious conspiracy and 172 who had pleaded guilty to assaulting police. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes had an 18-year sentence commuted, and Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio — the longest Jan. 6 sentence at 22 years — got a full pardon; both were free within hours. Then the pen kept moving down a receiving line of allies and donors: Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao, George Santos, 77 figures tied to the 2020 fake-elector scheme, Nikola fraudster Trevor Milton and foreign banker Julio Herrera Velutini, and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley. An analysis by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office found the second-term grants wiped out more than $1.3 billion in restitution and fines owed to victims — nearly $2 billion counting forfeitures — while, for scale, all 80 of Biden’s individual pardons totaled about $688,000. And only about ten of the roughly 1,600 grants went through the Justice Department office that traditionally vets applicants.

The pardon power is nearly unique in the Constitution for having no stated limit and no reviewing body. Article II grants it in a single clause, subject to one exception — impeachment — and to nothing else. There is no appeal, no committee, no standard of review. The Framers understood this was extraordinary, which is why Hamilton spent much of Federalist 74 defending it: mercy, he argued, needed to be swift and singular, and a president who abused it would answer to the voters and to impeachment.

Both halves of that safeguard have since been tested. Impeachment, as the record shows, does not reliably engage. What remains is the electorate — which is to say the check on the most unreviewable power in the Constitution is the one this site keeps returning to, because it is the only one still functioning.

There is also a quieter cost that the individual grants obscure. A pardon is not merely a release; it is a signal about what the law is for. When clemency is distributed to allies, donors and the politically useful, every prosecutor, juror and defendant in the country learns something about whether the system applies uniformly. The specific people released matter. What everyone else concludes from the pattern matters more, and lasts longer.

OPINION: Welcome to Clemency King, may we take your order? The Seditious-Conspiracy Combo comes with a free flag and a rally-stage cameo. The Fraud Value Meal is market price — banker Herrera Velutini’s daughter paid $3.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, and Milton and his wife together gave roughly $1.87 million before his roughly $676 million in restitution simply vanished. The Loyalty Special knocks a seven-year fraud sentence down to eleven weeks; Trump said the quiet part in the receipt, praising Santos for the “Courage” to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN. Around back, the World Liberty Financial car wash idles: a Binance armored truck rolls in after a $2 billion investment flowed through the Trump family’s stablecoin, and CZ drives out gleaming, a pardon dangling from the mirror like an air freshener. The party of Back the Blue freed the people who tased and pepper-sprayed the Blue; the Office of the Pardon Attorney gathers cobwebs — only about ten of some 1,600 grants ever passed through it — while pardon attorney Ed Martin, who also runs the DOJ’s “Weaponization Working Group,” posts “No MAGA left behind.” Alexander Hamilton pitched the pardon in Federalist 74 as a “well-timed offer” to calm an insurrection — not a punch card for the insurrectionists. A pen this generous has exactly one thing it cannot forgive: your vote. In 2026, that is the one clemency application still open to the public.