Trump Spends Final Hours In Office Pardoning Allies Whose Criminal Cases Arose From Investigations Of Trump, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That His Former Aides Still Had A Reason To Cooperate With Prosecutors

WASHINGTON. In a flurry of executive clemency issued during the final hours of his presidency, President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday granted full pardons to 73 individuals, an act administration officials described as the orderly resolution of a long-standing concern that the people who had worked most closely with the President were still answerable to the courts.

Among those pardoned was former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had been charged in 2020 with defrauding donors to a private border wall fundraising campaign. The pardon, issued before Bannon stood trial, resolved what aides characterized as the troubling possibility that supporters who had given money to build a wall might one day learn in open court where the money had gone. "The President did not believe Mr. Bannon should have to explain himself to a jury," said one official familiar with the decision, noting that the pardon spared everyone involved the inconvenience of a verdict.

The clemency wave followed earlier pardons, granted in the closing weeks of 2020, for former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, longtime adviser Roger Stone, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, three men whose criminal cases had arisen directly from the federal investigation into the President's own 2016 campaign. Legal observers noted that Stone had been convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness, and that Flynn had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, conduct the pardons left fully on the record while removing any consequence for it. Sources within the administration confirmed that the President considered it important for former aides facing scrutiny to understand, clearly and in advance, that cooperation with investigators carried risk and that silence would be looked after.

Also pardoned was Charles Kushner, a real estate developer and the father of senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, who had pleaded guilty in 2004 to tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and a scheme to retaliate against a cooperating witness in his own case. White House officials stressed that the Constitution grants the pardon power to the President without limit, and that the document contained no exception for relatives by marriage, for donors, or for men who had previously arranged the surveillance and entrapment of a brother-in-law.

Trump, who throughout his term had publicly described the prosecutions of his associates as politically motivated "witch hunts," reviewed the final clemency list with evident satisfaction, according to people present. Constitutional scholars observed that the pardons, while entirely lawful, completed a four-year demonstration that proximity to the President functioned as a form of legal insurance, and that the surest protection against federal prosecution was a documented history of working for the man holding the pen.

At press time, the roughly 1,500 individuals later charged in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol were reportedly encouraged to learn that the relevant precedent had been established for them four years in advance.