While the real economy suffers, Donald Trump and those around him created a new one. The federal pardon process is supposed to be stringent. Applications are submitted to the US Pardon Attorney, investigations are done, information is presented to the president, who makes the final decision.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second time, one of his first actions was to short-circuit this process to start handing out pardons himself.
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Trump’s behavior created what became labeled as the pardon economy. For a price, people with access to Trump would get pardons for their clients.
The White House became worried about the pardon economy and tightened up the pardon process. What the Trump White House didn’t say was that they were following the law and existing process to the letter.
Trump has politicized the pardon process by pardoning allies and Republicans.
There also appears to be a significant element of quid pro quo in some of Trump’s pardons.
Questions have also been raised about whether Trump has any idea about who is pardoning.
The potentially rapidly declining president did himself no favors when he was asked about pardoning Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao.
On 60 Minutes, Norah O’Donnell asked Trump, “Helping to make your family millions of dollars. It’s in that context that I do wanna ask you about crypto’s richest man, a billionaire known as C.Z. He pled guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money laundering laws. Looked at this, the government at the time said that C.Z. had caused “significant harm to U.S. national security”, essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around. Why did you pardon him?”
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