WASHINGTON: Reality TV stars, former lawmakers, a sheriff, a nursing home executive and a drug kingpin. One might wonder what do these people have in common. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fact is they are among the Americans convicted of crimes who have received pardons from US President Donald Trump since he took office in January.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And while US presidents have doled out questionable pardons in the past, Trump is doing so “in a bigger, more aggressive way with sort of no sense of shame,” said Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The pardon power has always been a little bit problematic because it\u2019s this completely unconstrained power that the president has,” Roosevelt told AFP<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Most presidents have issued at least some pardons where people look at them and they say: ‘This seems to be self-serving’or ‘this seems to be corrupt in some way’.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Trump is doling out pardons “that look like they\u2019re almost quid pro quo for financial donations,” Roosevelt said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among those receiving a pardon was Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive convicted of tax crimes and whose mother attended a $1 million-per-plate fund-raising dinner at Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago home in April.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other beneficiaries of Trump pardons include reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were serving lengthy prison sentences for bank fraud and tax evasion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their daughter, Savannah, is a prominent Trump supporter and gave a speech at last year\u2019s Republican National Convention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than half a dozen former Republican lawmakers convicted of various crimes have also received pardons along with a Virginia sheriff sentenced to 10 years in prison for taking $75,000 in bribes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On his first day in office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as they sought to prevent congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden\u2019s 2020 election victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next day, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who had been serving a life sentence for running the “Silk Road” online marketplace that facilitated millions of dollars of drug sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Barbara McQuade, a former prosecutor who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, said Trump is not the first president to be accused of “allowing improper factors to influence their pardon decisions.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gerald Ford\u2019s pardon of Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton\u2019s pardon of a commodities trader whose wife was a major Democratic donor and Biden\u2019s pardon of his son, Hunter, and other family members all drew some criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “[But] Trump is in a class by himself in both scope and shamelessness,” McQuade said in a Bloomberg opinion column.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “To him, pardons are just another deal. As long as a defendant can provide something of value in return, no crime seems too serious,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Democratic lawmaker Jamie Raskin, in a letter to Ed Martin, Trump\u2019s pardon attorney at the Justice Department, asked what criteria are being used to recommend pardons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It at least appears that you are using the Office of the Pardon Attorney to dole out pardons as favours to the President\u2019s loyal political followers and most generous donors,” Raskin wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Martin for his part has made no secret of the partisan nature of the pardons recommended by his office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WASHINGTON: Reality TV stars, former lawmakers, a sheriff, a nursing home executive and a drug kingpin. One might wonder what do these people have in common. The fact is they are among the Americans convicted of crimes who have received pardons from US President Donald Trump since he took office in January. And while US […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","inline_featured_image":false,"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_3859443944190656_798604363342440":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6400,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6398\/revisions\/6400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakjazbo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}‘Just another deal’<\/h2>\n\n\n\n