Trump’s Latest Batch Of Pardons Includes Rudy Giuliani And Other 2020 Election Deniers And Cryptocurrency Pals

As I’ve written previously, since the start of his second term, President Donald Trump has made it part of his agenda to rewrite the history of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that he unquestionably inspired at the end of his first term.

Trump wants desperately for the American people to forget what Jan. 6 factually was: a domestic terrorist attack that he egged on via months of “stop the steal” propaganda regarding the 2020 presidential race, which he has claimed and still claims — without a single, solitary shred of tangible evidence — was rigged against him. That’s why he pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters, and it’s why he contemplated the idea of paying reparations to Jan. 6 convicts. It’s why he recently suggested “the Biden FBI” was sent in to infiltrate and agitate the crowd on Jan. 6, despite the obvious fact that he was still the president at the time.

And it’s why Trump has now granted pardons to his former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and a wide array of other people accused of trying to overturn the results of the free and fair 2020 election.

On Monday, Trump’s pardon attorney, Ed Martin,  posted a copy of the pardon proclamation, which included a list of dozens of pardonees, on social media, thanking the president for, well, letting people off the hook for the alleged crimes he sent them to commit.

Actually, Trump didn’t pardon anybody. What he did was, by definition, political posturing.

From the New York Times:

Aside from Mr. Giuliani, the list included John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who advised Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign; Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff; Boris Epshteyn, a top presidential adviser; and Sidney Powell, another lawyer who led one of the most far-fetched efforts to use the courts to reverse Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat.

The pardons, which only apply to federal crimes, are primarily symbolic. None of those named on the list are currently facing federal charges, and the pardons cannot shield them from continuing state-level prosecutions.

Even though the pardons will have little practical effect, they stand as a reminder that Mr. Trump has often used his expansive powers to reward and protect his allies, even as his Justice Department has shattered traditional norms of independence from the White House by following his orders to pursue criminal cases against those he perceives to be his enemies.

In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called those who had received the pardons “great Americans,” claiming they had been “put through hell by the Biden administration for challenging an election.”

And there it is. There’s the sleight of hand that allows Trump and his team of professional leg-humpers to feign innocence.

Trump didn’t simply “challenge the election.” He, as the president of the United States, became a 24/7 lie-o-thon, claiming, based on nothing, that voting machines were rigged to change Trump votes to votes for President Joe Biden, that dead people’s names were being resurrected to cast ballots for Biden, that mail-in voting was being exploited for the purpose of cheating, and that election workers were stuffing ballots for Biden. These aren’t just challenges; they’re very specific allegations that Trump purported to be facts.

Trump pressured state officials to “find” votes in his favor. He threatened his own VP for not going along with his nonsense. He fired the head of election cybersecurity for not going along with his nonsense. He ignored the dozens of judges across lower courts, appellate courts and Supreme Courts that told him, unequivocally, that his legal team hadn’t provided evidence of a rigged election.

Giuliani has spent the last two years drowning in debt and legal woes due to his defamation campaign against  former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea Arshaye “Shaye” Moss, whom the anti-Black bigot falsely claimed were caught on video exchanging USB drives “like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” Even after Freeman testified before the Jan. 6 Committee about the violent threats and harassment she and her daughter received due to Trump falsely and repeatedly claiming they were involved in the election fraud that didn’t exist, the sitting president was still using his “Truth” Social platform to continue spreading lies about two civilians.

But sure, his people were “put through hell by the Biden administration for challenging an election.”

Mind you, using propaganda and terroristic tactics in attempts to keep Trump in power isn’t the only act that can earn one a pardon. Apparently, if you’re rich enough, you can also offer a little crypto-based quid pro quo to get your get-out-of-jail-free card, too.

From NPR:

It comes after recent clemency grants from Trump to former U.S. Rep. George Santos and an ex-CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange.

While former President Joe Biden still holds the record of 4,245 clemency actions, Trump’s second-term pardons and commutations are notable for their political and personal connections to the president, says Bernadette Meyler, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford University.

“There’s more of a sense of the insider pardon than we’ve seen previously,” Meyler said.

In mid-October, Trump commuted the prison sentence of Santos, the disgraced New York Republican who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft last year.

Days later the president handed a full and unconditional pardon to Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of Binance, who pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. Binance has ties to the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business, but Trump said in an interview with 60 Minutes that he does not know who Zhao is.

President Donald Trump is demonstrably the most outwardly corrupt president in modern history. That’s not propaganda. It’s not “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It’s an observable truth.

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