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Trump has been attracted to the power of the pardon from the early days of his first term in office because that power, granted by the Constitution, is absolute and cannot be interfered with by either the Congress or the Courts.
Republican criminals cooling their heels behind bars are advised to pay attention because it’s only a matter of time before the Trump White House establishes a 1-800-pardon-me number they can call to secure one of the get-out-of-jail-free cards Trump is issuing as eagerly as tariffs these days.
A sleazy former Republican state senator from Tennessee by the name of Brian Kelsey is the latest beneficiary of Trump’s pardon largess. He was convicted in a campaign finance scam in 2022 after pleading guilty in a deal with federal prosecutors that he later tried to withdraw. His withdrawal motion was denied, and he had begun serving a 21-month sentence in a minimum security prison camp in Kentucky when Trump came through with his pardon on Tuesday.
“God used Donald Trump to save me from the weaponized Biden DOJ,” the former state senator wrote on X. “May God bless America, despite the prosecutorial sins it committed against me, President Trump, and others the past four years.”
Listening to Republicans whine about their beleaguered lives these days makes it seem like God has nothing better to do then take care that their many, many grievances are attended to. Trump himself appears to believe that God intervened in Butler Pennsylvania and deflected a bullet, thus anointing him as the blessed president he believes he was destined to become.
Another notorious sleazeball pardoned recently by Trump is Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted in 2011 of attempting to sell the Senate seat held by Barack Obama which he was compelled to relinquish to take office as president. “Blago,” who was known to walk around with a pocket comb in his jacket pocket he used to attend to his considerable and elaborate pompadour, had his sentence commuted by Trump when he left office in 2020. He had been serving 14 years after having been impeached by the Illinois legislature and banned from ever holding office in the state again.
Signing the pardon in the Oval Office, Trump said of Blagojevich, “It’s my honor to do it. I’ve watched him. He was set up by a lot of bad people. Some of the same people that I had to deal with.” A lie of course. “Blago” was investigated for corruption and prosecuted in 2008 by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who was appointed to office in 2001 by Republican President George W Bush. Fitzgerald served until 2012 when he left office as a U.S. Attorney and went into private practice. Trump of course didn’t even run for president until 2015, long after Fitzgerald had been prosecutor, so no one involved in the prosecution of Blagojevich had been involved in any of the legal and prosecutorial travails faced by Trump after he took office in 2017.
Trump of course pardoned nearly 1,600 of the thugs convicted of attacking the Capitol, beating cops, and attempting to interfere with the certification of the 2020 election. Some of those he pardoned are now being brought up on charges for crimes committed after being released from jail for their January 6 offences. Their lawyers are attempting to claim that the new charges come under the Trump pardon in various ways, including that the January 6th charges made their clients a target.
Pardons are not the only avenue of Trump’s assault on the rule of law. A senior official in the Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney, Elizabeth Oyer, was fired yesterday for refusing to go along with restoring the gun rights of Hollywood asshole Mel Gibson, who had been convicted of domestic violence in 2011 and had his gun rights suspended under a provision of the law that bans the ownership of guns by persons convicted of domestic violence. “Within hours of my decision not to do that, I was escorted out of my office by DOJ security officers,” Oyer told reporters after being fired. Oyer told the Washington Post, “I think it is important to shed some light on what is going on in the Department of Justice. It is incredibly difficult for people who are still there to speak up, and people who are still there fear retaliation from the current administration.”
Oyer had submitted a list of people who had been vetted for the restoration of their gun rights because 20 years had passed since their conviction for nonviolent crimes, and they had maintained a record of exemplary conduct since then. The execrable Gibson, who had a record of other instances of domestic abuse, was not on her list. When she was ordered to add his name and refused, she was fired.
Trump’s concept of law and order seems to be the law for me, and order for you. He has been attracted to the power of the pardon from the early days of his first term in office because that power, granted by the Constitution, is absolute and cannot be interfered with by either the Congress or the Courts.
It is unknown at this time if there are limits to Trump’s use of the power to pardon. Trump’s former spiritual adviser from his first term, Robert Preston Morris, the founder of the Gateway mega church in Southlake, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, was indicted today on five counts of lewd and indecent acts with a 12-year-old child that took place when he was a traveling evangelical preacher. Morris was appointed to Trump’s evangelical advisory committee in 2016 and hosted Trump at a round table event at his Gateway mega church in 2020. The reputation of Morris was already bad enough last year that the Trump campaign made a point of informing the New York Times that Morris had nothing to do with Trump’s reelection efforts in 2024.
Morris has had connections with the Republican Party in Texas for years, and Republican connections seem to be one of the necessary elements in the way that Trump is doling out pardons. If you’re a friend of Trump’s as Gibson and Morris have been, clearly you are on the fast track to Pardon Nirvana in the Trump White House.
Who knows where the Trump pardon spree might stop? Murder isn’t out of the question, as Trump has already pardoned in his first term one member of the military accused of killing a prisoner of war in cold blood. Today, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he is appointing Trump’s former personal attorney, Tim Parlatore, to “remake” the Judge Advocate General Corps at the Pentagon because military lawyers have been seen by Trump and Hegseth as putting too many limitations on the “lethality” of soldiers in combat. This is seen by military experts as taking the leash off the commission of war crimes. With Trump’s move at the Pentagon today, there will be newly empowered “manly” troops in Trump’s macho-enhanced military, ignoring the battlefield reality that if our side is unleashed to commit war crimes, the other side will feel free to commit war crimes too.
Trump will be there to pardon any of our soldiers accused of war crimes in the future, but pardons won’t be necessary for any of our soldiers killed by war crimes committed by the enemy, a brutal truth that neither Hegseth nor Trump seem to be aware of or care about.
The pardon power may be absolute, but even the Constitution cannot bring someone back from the dead.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
You can read Lucian Truscott's daily articles at luciantruscott.substack.com. We encourage our readers to get a subscription.
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