The Pardon Power Is Broken
Trump’s Second Term and the Case for Amending the Constitution to Restrict the Presidential Pardon Power
From January 6 to financial crime to foreign narco-trafficking, Trump’s second-term pardons reveal how easily clemency can be weaponized. This memo lays out the thirty clearest examples and explains why relying on norms alone no longer works—and why constitutional reform may now be the only durable solution.
Executive Summary
This memo examines the use of the presidential pardon power during Donald Trump’s second term and evaluates whether its deployment represents a qualitative escalation in norm-breaking behavior with implications for corruption, democratic accountability, and the rule of law. Although the Constitution grants the president exceptionally broad authority to pardon federal offenses, the evidence reviewed here shows a marked shift away from individualized mercy toward pre-conviction intervention, political insulation, and protection of well-connected actors.
The memo identifies several recurring patterns: pardons issued to halt ongoing prosecutions; mass and coordinated clemency tied to the January 6 attack and the 2020 election certification effort; a heavy concentration of financial, crypto, and elite white-collar defendants; clemency with national-security and foreign-policy consequences; and efforts to extend pardon authority beyond constitutional limits into state criminal law.
These practices suggest Trump is systematically using or abusing the pardon process in a way that undermines the rule of law, facilitates corruption, and may benefit him politically and financially. The current situation warrants a constitutional amendment that would restrict the Presidential pardon powers in the United States and bring U.S. pardon procedures in line with the procedures used by other major Democracies.
Legal Baseline: Scope of the Presidential Pardon Power
Under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the president’s power to grant pardons for federal offenses is extraordinarily broad and largely unrestricted. With the sole exception of cases of impeachment, a president may issue pardons or commutations at any time, before or after conviction, for any reason, without judicial review, and without adherence to statutory procedures. Courts have consistently treated the pardon as a plenary executive act, leaving norms, political accountability, and self-restraint as the primary constraints on its use.
Patterns in the Second Trump Term
President Trump was not the first president to make controversial unjust pardons. But his use of the Presidential pardon power, especially in his second term has been sweeping, threatens the rule of law and facilitates corruption.
One striking feature of President Trump’s second-term clemency record is the frequency of pardons granted before conviction. The clemency granted to Henry Cuellar and Eric Adams illustrates this trend. In both cases, federal indictments had been filed, and prosecutors had indicated readiness for trial; the pardons terminated active prosecutions rather than forgiving completed punishment.
Pardons tied to the January 6 attack, efforts to disrupt the 2020 certification process, and pardons to officials who allegedly engaged in illegal acts to help him stay in power could facilitate future illegal acts by president. This is problematic given the Supreme Court ruling exempting the president for crimes committed on official acts.
Financial and regulatory crime defendants appear prominently among second-term beneficiaries. The pardon of Changpeng Zhao, former CEO of Binance, exemplifies a pattern involving wealthy executives convicted of or charged with complex compliance failures that enabled illicit finance. The lack of accountability in this case will reduce deterrence of firms and executives rumored to be linked to money laundering. The likelihood of a pardon could increase the tendency of some firms to break regulations assuring safe financial practices.
Historical experience shows that access to elite legal representation, political intermediaries, and economic influence plays a disproportionate role in the clemency process. Several Trump-era pardons and pardons by previous presidents involve individuals positioned to provide substantial financial benefit through donations, fundraising, or influence, reinforcing long-standing concerns that clemency operates unevenly across socioeconomic lines.
Family-linked clemency remains rare but institutionally revealing. Past and recent examples demonstrate how the pardon power can lawfully be exercised to benefit close relatives, underscoring its vulnerability to personal connection absent enforceable legal limits.
National Security and Foreign Policy Implications
The pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández carries distinct foreign-policy implications. Hernández had been extradited, tried, and convicted in U.S. federal court of conspiring to import massive quantities of cocaine into the United States, accepting bribes from traffickers, and using state security forces to protect narcotics operations.
Pardoning Hernández while simultaneously pursuing aggressive enforcement actions against other alleged narco-terrorism figures ( most notably Maduro) highlights an internal tension in U.S. drug-policy signaling. Critics argue that the juxtaposition weakens deterrence and undermines the credibility of U.S. counter-narcotics efforts abroad.
The Limits of Presidential Power and the State Boundary
In 2025, President Trump publicly announced that he had pardoned Tina Peters, who had been convicted in Colorado state court for election-related offenses. Because presidential clemency applies only to federal crimes, Colorado officials, including Governor Jared Polis, declined to release her.
This episode underscores the importance of limiting clemency where it would otherwise function to reward individuals who violate the law to advance presidential power. In a legal environment where presidents may be insulated from prosecution for official acts, preserving accountability for those who carry out or facilitate unlawful conduct becomes essential.
Historical Abuse of the Presidential Pardon Power
The misuse or controversial deployment of the presidential pardon power did not begin with Donald Trump. Every modern administration has confronted episodes in which clemency appeared to serve political, personal, or institutional interests rather than justice. What distinguishes the second Trump term is not that abuse occurred, but that it became more systematic, more overt, and more tightly integrated into a broader strategy of political protection.
During the Carter administration, President Jimmy Carter pardoned his half-brother Billy Carter, who had been investigated for failing to register as a foreign agent for Libya. Although no conviction had occurred, the pardon fueled criticism that family connection had short-circuited accountability. More recently, President Joe Biden granted clemency to his son Hunter Biden following a criminal conviction, marking one of the clearest modern examples of a president using the pardon power to extinguish legal consequences for an immediate family member after adjudication. Together, these episodes illustrate that the Constitution places few meaningful restraints on a president’s willingness or ability to protect close personal associates, whether before or after conviction.
Under President George H. W. Bush, the pardon of Caspar Weinberger, along with other Iran-Contra figures, effectively shut down an independent counsel investigation that was still unfolding. These pardons were widely understood as institution-protective acts designed to foreclose further inquiry into executive-branch wrongdoing rather than as measures of individualized mercy. They remain one of the clearest examples of clemency being used to terminate investigations implicating senior officials.
President Bill Clinton left office amid perhaps the most notorious modern pardon controversies. The pardon of Marc Rich, a fugitive indicted on tax and fraud charges, followed lobbying by Rich’s ex-wife, who was a major Democratic donor.
Clinton also pardoned Eddie DeBartolo Jr., the longtime owner of the San Francisco 49ers, who had pleaded guilty to failing to report an attempted bribe of a Louisiana governor. In both cases, wealth, access, and political proximity raised unavoidable questions about whether clemency functioned as a privilege available to the connected rather than an equitable act of justice.
More recently, President Joe Biden granted clemency to a Pennsylvania judge convicted in the “cash-for-kids” scandal, in which juveniles were sent to private detention facilities in exchange for kickbacks. While no direct personal relationship between the judge and the president has been publicly substantiated, the case nevertheless underscores how the pardon power can erase accountability for severe abuses of authority that inflicted lasting harm on vulnerable populations. The controversy illustrates that even clemency decisions made without clear personal gain can undermine public confidence when they negate consequences for egregious misconduct.
Against this backdrop, Trump’s use of the pardon power is best understood not as an unprecedented invention, but as an escalation and consolidation of long-standing vulnerabilities. Unlike prior episodes, which tended to be episodic, end-of-term, or personally idiosyncratic, Trump’s second-term pardons exhibit a more systematic pattern. Clemency was repeatedly deployed to halt active prosecutions, to reward loyalty in connection with efforts to retain power, and to shield both political allies and elite financial actors from legal consequences. The significance of this shift lies less in any single pardon than in the cumulative transformation of clemency into an instrument of political insulation.
In that sense, Trump is neither the first president to abuse the pardon power nor the only one in recent memory to provoke public outrage through its use. What sets his second term apart is the degree to which clemency became embedded in a broader strategy of resistance to legal accountability—applied broadly, earlier in the criminal process, and with fewer rhetorical or normative constraints than in prior administrations.
Paywall Transition
The following section presents a catalog of the thirty most egregious pardons and commutations issued during President Trump’s second term, followed by a concluding memorandum that argues these cases collectively demonstrate the need for a constitutional amendment to restrict the presidential pardon power and bring U.S. practice into closer alignment with the safeguards used by other democratic systems.
Thirty Notable Second Term Trump Pardons Sorted by Category
Political Violence and Election-Related Pardons
