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Presidential clemency/pardons is a fascinating phenomenon. Trump has apparently granted clemency less than any president in modern history apparently. Obama granted the most.https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/24/so-far-trump-has-granted-clemency-less-frequently-than-any-president-in-modern-history/ …
What makes Trump's approach stand out is not the quantity but the quality. Clinton was criticized for issuing a flurry of 170 pardons in his final days, but as NYT points out, the diff is that he still relied on the Justice Dept as primary filter. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/us/politics/trump-pardons.html …pic.twitter.com/mWrFASpIJi
I'd like to see a comparison that has a breakdown of *types* of pardon: 1. Clemency appeals via due process with no grift 2. Grift market based on $ and lobbying by wealthy 3. POTUS-initiated pardons based on personal selfless interest 4. Strategic political favors
I wouldn't actually expect Trump to top the charts on any of the 4 categories, but I'd expect 2 and 4 to dominate. He's too uninterested in others unless he is in the equation himself. The NYT article is really bad. Like journalistic malpractice bad.
It seemed to suggest that somehow Trump was the worst offender on this front, and besides the one qualified Clinton comparison, did not contextualize his clemency record against modern presidents. I googled and found the Pew article after smelling a fish reading the NYT one.
Telling this story honestly but with nuance still would still tell a bad-enough portrait of Trump as a more self-dealing user of the clemency power than most. But they wrote it instead in a weirdly unnecessary dishonest way.
The Marc Rich pardon was really fatal, because there's nothing that the WASP establishment dislikes so much as a graceless exit. That provided Republicans with a justification for widening that one system-gaming into, now, a cottage industry for white-nationalist insurgence.
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