Wandering among the media over the Thanksgiving weekend….
I read that President Donald Trump announced that he has granted a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been serving one year of a 45–year sentence in a federal prison in West Virginia for running an immense, decades-long cocaine-trafficking operation, in cahoots with some of Latin America’s most notorious drug cartels during his term as president of Honduras.
[Hernández was released from prison on Tuesday.]
Plainly proud of himself, the Trumpster boasted of this act of misplaced mercy on his Truth Social digital site in all caps if you please, “CONGRATULATIONS TO JUAN ORLANDO HERNANDEZ ON YOUR UPCOMING PARDON. MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!” Señora Hernández reportedly wept (happy tears) on hearing her husband will soon be free.
Then on Sunday I read that Trump has commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who was serving a seven-year sentence for his part in a scheme that bilked 10,000 investors of $1.6 billion by — the usual thing — lying about the performance of the funds he operated and covering payouts Ponzi-style.
A commutation and a pardon are not quite the same: In the former case the conviction still stands, in the latter it is erased. But who’s counting? Gentile had reported to prison Nov. 14 and was free after serving less than two weeks of his time.
Back to social media, of course: On Thanksgiving Day Trump’s pardon czar — yes, he has one, named Alice Marie Johnson —declared she was “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.”
This Alice Marie Johnson, it is fun to know, was convicted of cocaine-trafficking charges in 1996 and had served 21 years of a life sentence when the Trumpster commuted her sentence during his first term.
Alice Johnson during Trump’s State of the Union Address in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 5, 2019. Jared Kushner, advisor to the president, and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter, on her right
Just as I was gathering my thoughts about the Latin American president who flooded the United States with coke and the private executive who got caught defrauding thousands of unknowing investors and the ex-con managing Trump’s clemency operations, news came that Bibi Netanyahu, who was indicted on corruption charges six years ago, asked Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, to pardon him.
This is a very big banana. The Israeli prime minister stands accused of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust in three separate cases and has been dodging justice, lately by prolonging a genocide, ever since his trials began. As has been well-reported, Netanyahu has long attempted to destroy the Israeli judiciary — its independence and integrity — to pervert the nation’s courts in his favor and, so, avoid a guilty verdict.
Demonstrators in Jerusalem Feb. 13, 2023, join a wave of protests against the government’s plan to curb the power of the judiciary
And what did Bibi say in his appeal to Herzog? He must be cleared of all charges, he asserted, for the sake of Israel’s “security and political reality.” O.K., this has been his bedrock argument all along. But then the beyond-belief taker-of-the-cake, a reference to Trump’s recent appeals to Herzog in Netanyahu’s behalf:
“President Trump called for an immediate end to the trial so that I may join him in further advancing vital and shared interests of Israel and the United States.”
Pardons, pardons, commutations, commutations. In mid–October Trump commuted the sentence of George Santos, the short-lived Republican congressman, who was serving seven years for an assortment of fraudulent activities.
A few days later it was Changpeng Zhao, the former chief executive of Binance, a cryptocurrency firm, who was given a brief prison sentence and fined $50 million for using Binance to launder money. Binance — so often there is some kind of back story in these cases —turns out to be involved in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency doings. Trump gave Zhao a full pardon on Oct. 21.
Yet more. On Nov. 9 Trump pardoned — preemptively, short of any charges filed — 80 people associated with his efforts to reverse the 2020 election result. In a piece published the following day, Forbes lists eight high-profile figures Trump has pardoned so far in his second term. And there are, of course, those convicted or awaiting trial for crimes committed during the now-famous Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the Capitol. On the day of his inauguration, Jan. 20, 2025, Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people.
Trump’s misuse of his power to pardon, including the clemency extended to war criminals during his first term, is extravagant by any measure. But he is not setting any records by way of numbers.
During his years in the White House Joe Biden pardoned, preemptively pardoned or commuted the sentences of 4,245 people. This figure includes 1,500 commutations and 39 pardons the Biden White House announced on a single day, a little more than a month before he left office. Dec. 9, 2024, now marks a record in this line.
“There’s more of a sense of the insider pardon than we’ve seen previously,” Bernadette Meyler, who professes in constitutional law at Stanford University, told NPR after Trump’s Nov. 9 pardons were announced. Will you give us all a break, Professor? Only a card-carrying liberal could possibly make such an assertion. No one who followed the Biden pardons, starting with his son, Hunter, can take it seriously.
Let’s give these numbers a little historical context. During his first term Trump issued 1,700 pardons or commutations. Obama issued 1,927 during his White House years, George W. Bush 200 and Bill Clinton 459.
If you want to go further back in history: Kennedy, 575; Theodore Roosevelt, 981; Ulysses S. Grant, 1,332; Lincoln, 343. Andrew Johnson extended clemency to 7,650 people, but this included many thousands of former Confederate officials and officers and so must be counted an atypical case.
Something has happened these past two administrations, we have to conclude, and I see two ways to explain it. Both, in my view, reflect the state of our crumbling republic in its late-imperial phase.
One, we live amid the radical breakdown of law and the decay of our foundational institutions. Power is ever more — and ever more unconstitutionally — concentrated in the executive branch, and both of the White House’s most recent inhabitants, Biden no less than Trump, have demonstrated an extravagant disregard for the law.
And as the United States collapses into lawlessness, an obvious domestic crisis also has obvious international dimensions. When Trump announces his intention to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández even as the United States prosecutes an unlawful campaign against “narco-terrorists” and threatens to attack Venezuela on the specious grounds its government is a major drug-trafficker, one or another kind of disorder is the only possible outcome.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic,” Mike Vigil, formerly a senior official at the Drug Enforcement Agency, told The New York Times after Trump announced the Hernández pardon, “and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,”
To turn this question another way, would Bibi Netanyahu have cited Trump in his request for a pardon had he, Trump, not made the same appeal — and not backed the Israeli terror machine’s barbaric lawlessness in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in West Asia?
Related to this, there is the progressive sequestration of power that is now evident all around us — certainly in the United States but also among many of its clients, if not most of them. Trump’s pardons and most of Trump’s foreign and security policies betray a supreme indifference to the Constitution and the American electorate and a betrayal of those who voted him into to office.
The exercise of power without reference to its legality, sequestered power and its close cousin, impunity: The festival of pardons that now features prominently in America’s political life is an in-our-faces measures of this. A dysfunction all by itself, the crowded party of pardons is also a symptom of something graver.
Bitter as this may be to recognize, Trump’s regular resort to pardons and commutations also betokens crises that run well beyond the setting free of drug-runners, financial flim-flam artists and assorted other scammers in higher places than they ever ought to be. This is what decline looks like on the ground.
Source: Consortium News.
