Donald Trump's Clemencies: Unconventional Acts, Conventional Justifications

An official White House statement released on November 25, 2020, followed up on a tweet from President Donald Trump announcing that he was pardoning Michael Flynn.

White House Press Release, Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Grant of Clemency for General Michael T. Flynn (Nov. 25, 2020), at https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regarding-executive-grant-clemency-general-michael-t-flynn/ [hereinafter Flynn Pardon].

The Flynn pardon ignited a firestorm of criticism.

Savage, supra note 3; Eric Tucker, Trump Pardons Flynn Despite Guilty Plea in Russia Probe, AP News, Nov. 26, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-pardon-michael-flynn-russia-aeef585b08ba6f2c763c8c37bfd678ed; Benjamin Wittes, Why the Flynn Pardon Matters, Lawfare, Dec. 18, 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-flynn-pardon-matters; Rachel VanLandingham & Geoffrey Corn, Trump's Blackwater Pardons Erase the Line Between Slaughter and Justified Wartime Violence, USA Today, Dec. 23, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/12/23/trump-pardons-american-war-criminals-undermines-rule-law-column/4026014001/; Laurel Wamsley, Shock and Dismay After Trump Pardons Blackwater Guards Who Killed 14 Iraqi Civilians, NPR, Dec. 23, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/23/949679837/shock-and-dismay-after-trump-pardons-blackwater-guards-who-killed-14-iraqi-civil; Jude Joffe-Block & Terry Greene Sterling, Joe Arpaio: Inside the Fallout of Trump's Pardon, Guardian, Apr. 8, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/08/joe-arpaio-sheriff-arizona-donald-trump; Amita Kelly, President Trump Pardons Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, NPR, Aug. 25, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/08/25/545282459/president-trump-pardons-former-sheriff-joe-arpaio; Terry Greene Sterling & Jude Joffe-Block, Joe Arpaio Pardoned By Donald Trump: The Inside Story of How It Really Happened, Slate, Apr. 26, 2021, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/04/joe-arpaio-donald-trump-pardon-history.html; Jim Sergent & George Petras, Trump's Final Pardons Included Controversial Allies, but not Himself or His Family, USA Today, Dec. 30, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/12/30/trump-pardons-controversial-patterns/4038315001/; Jonathan Lemire, et al, Trump Pardons Ex-Strategist Steve Bannon, Dozens of Others, AP News, Jan. 20, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/steve-bannon-trump-pardons-broidy-66c82f25134735e742b2501c118723bb; Here are Some of the People Trump Pardoned, N.Y Times, Jan. 26, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/article/who-did-trump-pardon.html.

The White House statement justified the Flynn pardon by claiming that he “should never have been prosecuted” and went on to say that “the relentless, partisan pursuit of an innocent man” must end.

Flynn Pardon, supra note 2.

The Flynn pardon was just one of President Trump's 238 acts of clemency during his four years in office.

Clemency Statistics, U.S. Dep’t of Just., https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-statistics, (last visited Sept. 26, 2021).

The former President caused a stir when he pardoned four Blackwater contractors convicted of killing 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007,

VanLandingham & Corn, supra note 6; Wamsley, supra note 6.

In what follows we examine what Trump said when he exercised his clemency power and how he used various platforms to justify his use of that extraordinary presidential prerogative. We note that while his use of it was often controversial and unconventional, and while some of the mediums through which he communicated about clemency were novel, his public justifications were quite conventional. They drew on a set of well recognized grounds to explain the clemency power's uses.

In Part II, we examine the existing scholarship on former President Trump's use of the pardon power with a particular focus on controversy and unconventionality. Part III explores rhetorical justifications for clemency identified by other scholars, and Part IV analyzes a shift from rehabilitative to retributive rhetoric that occurred alongside a shift in penal philosophy at the end of the twentieth century. Part V presents our findings about Trump's clemency justifications. Part VI offers a conclusion.

We are not the first to explore Trump's use of the pardon power, although we are among the first to focus specifically on his justificatory strategies. Others have focused on Trump's circumvention of the standard procedures for granting clemency, the influence of personal connections on his decision making, Trump's exploration of the possibility of a self-pardon, and the impact of his specific acts of clemency.

A number of scholars have highlighted former President Trump's disregard of the federal government's well-established clemency processes.

Bernadette Meyler, Trump's Theater of Pardoning, 72 Stan. L. Rev. 92, (Mar. 2020) [hereinafter Trump's Theater of Pardoning]; Bernadette Meyler, Transforming the Theater of Pardoning, 33 Fed. Sent. R. 293, 293–96 (2021) [hereinafter Transforming the Theatre of Pardoning].; Jeffrey Crouch, President Donald J. Trump and the Clemency Power: Is Claiming ‘Unfair’ Treatment for Pardon Recipients the New ‘Fake News’? in Presidential Leadership in the Trump Clemency 99–120 (Charles Lamb & Jacob Neiheisel eds., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.); Budd Shenkin & David Levine, Should the Power of Presidential Pardon Be Revised, 47 Hasting Const. L. Q. 3, 3–18 (2019); Matthew Gluck & Jack Goldsmith, Donald Trump and the Clemency Process, 33 Fed. Sent. R. 297, 297–300 (2021); Kenneth Vogel & Nicholas Confessore, Access, Influence and Pardons: How a Set of Allies Shaped Trump's Choices, N.Y. Times, Mar. 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/21/us/politics/trump-pardons.html; Michael Schmidt & Kenneth Vogel, Prospect of Pardons in Final Days Fuels Market to Buy Access to Trump, N.Y. Times, Jan. 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/us/politics/trump-pardons.html; Margaret Colgate Love, After Trump: Restoring Legitimacy to the Pardon Power, 33 Fed. Sent. R., 285, 285–92 (2021); Tyler Brown, The Court Can’t Even Handle Me Right Now: The Arpaio Pardon and Its Effect on the Scope of Presidential Pardons, 46 Pepp. L. Rev. 331, 331–36 (2019); Trump Grants Clemency to Former Blackwater Contractors Convicted of War Crimes in Iraq and Associates Prosecuted Following the Mueller Investigation, 115 Am. J. of Int’l L., 329, 329–34 (2021) [hereinafter Trump Grants Clemency to Former Blackwater]; Julia Jefferson-Bullock, I, Too, Sing America: Presidential Pardon Power and the Perception of Good Character, 57 Duq. L. Rev. 309, 309–24 (2019); Mark Osler, Clemency as the Soul of the Constitution, 34 J.L. & Pol. 131, 131–64 (2019).

While he ignored the pardon attorney, Kenneth Vogel reported that 27 out of the 238 total pardons and commutations were endorsed by the Aleph Institute: “a loose collection of lawyers, lobbyists, activists, and Orthodox Jewish leaders who had worked with Trump administration officials on criminal justice legislation championed by Jared Kushner.”

Vogel & Confessore, supra note 19.

Others argue that Trump ignored the Department of Justice's recommendations and screenings

Trump's Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19; Transforming the Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19, at 293; Crouch, supra note 19; Shenkin & Levine, supra note 19; Gluck & Goldsmith, supra note 19, at 297.

But former President Trump's preferred clemency process had other distinctive and unusual features. Some claim that it lacked “any effort to make the process appear fair”

Love, supra note 19, at 286.

Bernadette Meyler and Margaret Love see in Trump's use of the clemency power an alarming disregard of the law.

Trump's Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19.; Transforming the Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19, at 294–95; Love, supra note 19, at 285–289.

The pardon of “ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio…in August 2017”

Crouch, supra note 19.

Scholars also suggest that many of former President Trump's clemency decisions, including who he pardoned, whose recommendations he sought, and the medium he used to communicate the pardon, were really about him and his sense of being underappreciated or embattled by hostile political forces.

Trump's Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19; Transforming the Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19, at 293–94; Brown, supra note 40, at 27–60; Crouch, supra note 19; Love, supra note 19, at 286; Shenkin & Levine, supra note 19, at 5; Scott Johnson, President Donald J. Trump and the Potential Abuse of the Pardon Power, 9 Faulkner L. Rev. 289, 289–328 (2018); Paul Larkin, Jr., The Legality of Presidential Self-Pardons, 44 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 763, 763–826 (2021); Gluck & Goldsmith, supra note 19, at 299; Goldsmith & Gluck, supra note 21; Jefferson-Bullock, supra note 19, at 315; Frank Bowman, III, Are Blanket Pardons Constitutional, 33 Fed. Sent. R 301, 301–06 (2021), Vogel & Confessore, supra note 19; Schmidt & Vogel, supra note 19.

Colton Brown connects this pattern to Trump's impeachment process. He claims that several pardons and commutations granted after the President's first acquittal were undeniably well-connected to the President and demonstrated “President Trump's ‘growing sense of political invulnerability.’”

Brown, supra note 40, at 45.

Brown argues that Trump's pardons were particularly controversial because of his “pattern of rewarding people popular with his supporters or those who had spoken glowingly of Trump.”

Brown, supra note 40, at 43.

Others focus on the fact that Trump was openly partial to his political allies, granting clemency to longtime allies Roger Stone”

Transforming the Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19, at 294.

The controversial pardons of three United States service members - Michael Behenna, Clint Lorance, and Mathew Golsteyn - also generated substantial scholarly commentary.

Trump's Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19; Transforming the Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19, at 294; Brown, supra note 40, at 44–45; Love, supra note 19 at 286; Trump Grants Clemency to Former Blackwater, supra note 19; Stuart Ford, Has President Trump Committed a War Crime By Pardoning War Criminals?, 35 Am. U. Int’l L. Rev. 757, 757–820 (2020); David Maurer, War Crime Pardons and Presidential (Self-) Restraint, 33 Fed. Sent. R. 313, 313–318 (2021); Issuing Several Pardons, President Trump Intervenes in Proceedings of U.S. Troops Charged or Convicted of Acts Amounting to War Crimes, 114 Am. J. Int’l L. 307 (2020).

Meyler claims that these military pardons “affirmed the use of force regardless of international human rights”

Transforming the Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19, at 294.

The question of a potential self-pardon by President Trump drew a significant amount of scholarly attention.

Trump's Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19; Transforming the Theater of Pardoning, supra note 19, at 294; Brown, supra note 40, at 48; Crouch, supra note 19; Larkin Jr., supra note 43, at 773–777; Paul Eckstein & Mikaela Colby, Presidential Pardon Power: Are There Limits and, If Not, Should There Be, 51 Ariz. St. L. J. 71, 71–108 (2019); Schmidt, supra note 19.

When scholars venture beyond the fact of particular clemency grants, their political meaning or the controversies they generated, few have very much to say about the justificatory rhetoric on which Trump relied. However, Crouch does note Trump's frequent use of the word “unfair” in his grants of clemency, which he claims was “an intentional messaging decision.”

Crouch, supra note 19

Clemency demands explanation and justification in a constitutional democracy because the President's power to grant pardons and reprieves is a plenary power, a power that knows no legal limits.

For a discussion of the need to justify clemency, see Austin Sarat, Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution (2005). The following discussion is adapted from that book.

Highlighting this, the Attorney General of the United States issued a report in the mid-twentieth century on release procedures in the federal system, including the President's clemency power. He described its relation to law as follows:

Emerging from the field of mere arbitrary caprice or semi-magical folklore, pardon has become an institution which is part of, and yet above, the legal system. It has never been crystallized into rigid rules. Rather its function has been to break rules. It has been the safety valve by which harsh, unjust, or unpopular results of formal rules could be corrected. The almost wholly unrestricted scope of the power...has been the tool by which many of the most important reforms of the substantive criminal law have been introduced.

United States Department of Justice, 3 Attorney General's Survey of Release Procedures 209, 295 (1939).

Right from the start of the Republic the clemency power has been difficult to reconcile with America's commitment to the rule of law and traditions of democratic governance. Writing in 1788, Alexander Hamilton set out to explain and defend what seemed to his contemporaries something of an anomaly in America's new constitutional scheme, namely lodging the power to grant “reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States” solely in the President of the United States.

U.S. Const. art. 2, § 2, cl.1.

Yet Hamilton recognized that, notwithstanding its advantages, granting such a power to the Chief Executive blurred the boundary between the rule of law and monarchical privilege. Traditional ideas of sovereignty would be imported into a document dedicated to constructing a government of limited powers. Like the king acting “in a superior sphere...,” lodging the power to pardon exclusively in the President meant that the fate of persons convicted of crimes would be dependent ultimately on the “sole fiat” of a single person. This was hardly the image of a government of laws and not of persons that Hamilton sought to defend. This is why, unlike the President's power as commander-in-chief of the army and navy a constitutional provision the propriety of which, in Hamilton's view, was “so evident in itself ... that little need be said to explain or enforce it,”

Id.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the rehabilitative ideal dominated American thought about crime and punishment and also played a prominent role in thinking about clemency.

Francis Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose (1981).

According to the 1976 Report of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration, rehabilitation emerged from “a humanistic tradition which, in pressing for ever more individualization of justice ... demanded that we treat the criminal, not the crime.”

See Andrew Von Hirsch, Doing Justice: The Choice of Punishments, 29 (1976).

Rehabilitative theories were embodied in indeterminate sentencing schemes in which judges would sentence those convicted of crimes to a range of prison time, leaving determination of the exact amount of time served to parole boards whose job it would be to carefully monitor the inmates’ progress on the road to reform.

For a description and critique of the practices of indeterminate sentencing, see Marvin Frankel, Criminal Sentences: Law Without Order, (1976).

If the rehabilitative ideal, and the redemptive theory of clemency, were indeed important throughout a large part of the twentieth century, by the late 1960s both were on the verge of a dramatic and massive repudiation.

Id. at 1506–7.

Tougher sentencing laws in the form of mandatory minimums for a variety of crimes increased the severity of punishments across the board, created more draconian conditions in prisons, and increased use of the death penalty. These are all symptoms of a society “governed through crime.”

See Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: The War on Crime and the Transformation of American Governance, 1960–2000 (2009).

Since the middle of the last century, criminal justice populism has altered the way presidents and state governors explain and justify grants of clemency. Today the prevailing cultural commonsense holds that we need to punish severely in order for punishment to be effective and that mercy should be greatly limited in order to ensure criminals are not released from prison “far too soon.”

Since the claim that punishment is now too lenient is embedded in cultural understandings rather than experience with crime, the implication that we are not now imposing enough punishment, is a cultural tenet, a value judgement, not subject to empirical refutation. See Stuart A. Scheingold, The Politics of Law and Order: Street Crime and Public Policy, 226–27 (2011). Thus, incontestable documentation that the United States is unrivaled among western democracies in severity of sentences and time served for criminal violence is ignored or deemed irrelevant.

The attack on mercy and the rehabilitative ideal has also been seen in a flourishing industry of academic criticism. Since the late 1960s, academic critics on both the right and the left have voiced various worries about rehabilitation—that it depends on lodging discretionary authority in sentencing judges and that discretion was often associated with disparity and discrimination;

See Von Hirsch, supra note 129, at 29. “The most obvious drawback of allowing wide-open discretion....is the disparity it permits....”.

Rapaport asserts that, by the end of the twentieth century, the ethos of neoretributivism

Rapaport, supra note 99, at 364.

Former President Trump granted 238 clemencies to a total of 231 individuals; four of whom were both pardoned and commuted, and three of whom were commuted twice. In the sources we examined, he offered a total of 634 justifications for 227 of his grants of clemency. He offered no justifications for eleven of his clemencies.

We examined all justificatory statements supplied by the White House Press Secretary.

We did not include the Pardon Attorney Statements because they are only templates that are reused, only changing to fill in the name of the person receiving clemency and their sentence. They are signed by the President with generalized language that do not tailor justifications to any individual case. Additionally, we looked through many TV, newspaper, and radio interviews, as well as transcripts from Trump's rallies. However, we did not include them in our analyzes because there is no comprehensive list of all of these events, and we could not be sure we looked at every interview, rally, etc. We opted to focus on datasets we were sure were complete. Within our chosen media, we found several statements where Trump mentioned the unfairness of a trial or prosecution for someone to whom he would eventually grant clemency, without specifically mentioning clemency or responding to a question about clemency. We included these types of statements, we included these types of statements only if they came within a year of the eventual clemency.

In total, we identified justifications in 211 official press statements, 34 tweets from @RealDonaldTrump, 10 tweets from @WhiteHouse45, 2 from @ TrumpWarRoom, and 52 in statements to the press, speeches or remarks with reporters. These 311 statements contained 634 separate justifications.

In order to search the databases and Twitter accounts for Trump's clemency justifications, we created a list of search terms to standardize our searches across mediums. This included all the first name, last names, combination of first and last names, and a series of key terms in a document, including “clemency,” “commutation,” “pardon,” among others specific to clemency recipients. This list is in the appendix.

Not all of Trump's justificatory statements fit into the four categories—mercy, redemptive/rehabilitative, retributive, utilitarian—that we discussed above. We identified two other categories in addition to the widely accepted ones which we labelled “evidence of smooth re-entry” and “character” related. While rehabilitative rhetoric often references character, much of Trump's character-based language was not linked to a post-sentencing change in behavior. For example, Trump described one person he pardoned as “a pillar of his community” and another as someone who “has no documented history of violence” and “who simply stumbled along life's path and made a mistake.”

White House Statement, President Trump Commutes Sentence of Ted Suhl, (July 29, 2019), at https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-trump-commutes-sentence-ted-suhl/.

President Trump pardoned Theodore E. Suhl on July 29, 2019. Mr. Suhl participated in a bribery scheme in order to increase Medicaid payments to his company, and was sentenced to seven years in prison. The statement describes him as a “a pillar of his community before his prosecution and a generous contributor to several charities”; White House Statement, Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Grants of Clemency, (Oct. 21, 2020), at https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-regarding-executive-grants-clemency-102120/.

On October 21, 2020 President Trump issued a press statement commuting the sentence of John Bolen, a small business owner who transported cocaine from the Bahamas to Florida. The statement notes that he has “no documented history of violence” and “simply stumbled along life's path and made a mistake”.

We disaggregated Trump's retributive statements into three subcategories: excessive punishment, claims of innocence, and unfair process. Excessive punishment justifications contend that the sentence was disproportionate to the crime. Others suggest that the person who received clemency would have gotten a lower sentence if tried today or that they should have never been prosecuted in the first place, or that other people who committed the same crime were not given the same sentence.

This final reason was used many times with the Mueller pardons. Notably, Trump claimed that “General Michael Flynn's life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book” 4/20/18 tweet from @RealDonaldTrump.

Innocence claims assert that the clemency recipient did not commit the crime for which they were convicted. This includes claims that the trial never should have happened, or they were wrongly convicted. We put justificatory rhetoric that referenced the “Witch Hunt” or the “Mueller Scam” under this category because Trump used those terms to justify his clemencies on the grounds that the people targeted were actually innocent.

Unfair process justifications suggest that some part of the investigation, trial, or sentencing process was suspect, such as a tainted jury pool, evidence that should not have been admitted, and prosecutorial misconduct.

We also disaggregated redemptive/rehabilitative justifications. We identified instances when Trump said that a person had accepted responsibility, had acknowledged wrongdoing or had expressed remorse.

Trump often justified pardons by reference to particular redemptive actions that people to whom he granted clemency performed during or outside of prison. This included teaching others or educating themselves while in prison, supporting their community or family outside of prison, or becoming a person of faith.

This is distinguished from character-related justifications because it is an action they started doing post crime, not a characteristic they’ve always embodied.

In what follows, we first report on the overall composition of Trump's clemency justifications. Next, we analyze the breakdown of those justifications by crime type, medium of statement, time during Trump's term when they were granted, pardon attorney recommendation,

Data sourced from Goldsmith and Gluck, in their spreadsheet titled Trump's Aberrant Pardons and Commutations Chart. Further explanation of their methods is detailed in the following pages, in the section Recommended by Pardon Attorney.

Of the 634 justifications offered by Trump for his clemencies

38.8% (246) were retributive

Figure 1

While Trump's use of retributive justifications continued the trend set by his predecessors, he broke with their recent tendency to eschew using redemption/rehabilitation to explain clemency grants.

Below, we will show that much of Trump's retributive rhetoric was used when he gave scripted and unscripted comments to the press. For example, in prepared remarks to reporters aboard Air Force One on August 7th, 2019, Trump explained why he commuted the sentence of former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich by saying that “You have drug dealers that get not even 30 days, and they’ve killed 25 people. They put him in jail for 18 years, and I think it's very unfair.”

Administration of Donald J. Trump, 2019 Remarks and an Exchange With Reporters Aboard Air Force One, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents 1 (2019).

Of the 246 retributive justifications Trump offered for his clemencies the majority (57.3%) followed the Blagojevich pattern, referencing excessive punishment. 24.4% involved claims of unfair process, and 18.3% referenced claims of innocence.

Figure 2

In many cases, Trump offered more than one kind of retributive justification. This is evidenced in the official White House press statement about clemency for Paul Erickson who, while charged with wire fraud and money laundering, was involved with the Trump campaign's Russia connections.

Carrie Johnson & Philip Ewing, Paul Erickson, Boyfriend of Russian Agent Maria Butina, Charged in Fraud Scheme, NPR, Feb. 6, 2019 https://www.npr.org/2019/02/06/687417296/paul-erickson-boyfriend-of-russian-agent-maria-butina-charged-in-fraud-scheme; Nicholas Fandos, Operative Offered Trump Campaign ‘Kremlin Connection’ Using N.R.A. Ties, N.Y. Times, Dec 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/us/politics/trump-putin-russia-nra-campaign.html. Sioux Falls Man Sentenced for Wire Fraud and Money Laundering, United States Attorney’s Off., Dist. S. Dakota (July 6, 2020), https://www.justice.gov/usao-sd/pr/sioux-falls-man-sentenced-wire-fraud-and-money-laundering-1. Journalists note Erickson's relationship with Russian agent Maria Butina, as well as evidence that he attempted to facilitate a back-channel meeting between Trump and Putin. The Trump Administration's Press Statement blames his wire fraud conviction, for which he was found to have lied to his investors, on an association with Russia.

Among the 214 rehabilitative justifications that Trump offered for his clemencies, 76.2% referencing post-sentence redeeming behavior while 23.8% referenced accepting responsibility by the person whose sentence Trump commuted or pardoned

Figure 3

In a statement from the White House Press Secretary, Trump announced that he had commuted the sentence of Adrianne Davis Miller. Miller struggled with drug addiction, but had no previous federal charges before she pleaded guilty to possession and intent to distribute methamphetamine.

Margaret Anne Davis, Clemency for Adrianne Davis Miller serving 15 years for a NON-VIOLENT Drug Conspiracy, Change.org, https://www.change.org/p/donald-trump-clemency-for-adrianne-davis-miller-serving-15-years-for-a-non-violent-drug-conspiracy.

President Trump's 238 acts of clemency generated considerable controversy, but the justifications offered were quite conventional. He continued the retributive trend established by his predecessors. He did, however, resurrect rehabilitation as a clemency justification. However, here the medium mattered. When he spoke in his own voice, in speeches, tweets, and answering reporter questions, he was much more prone to make retributive arguments, to emphasize unfairness or injustice as a reason for clemency. And strikingly, the most frequent and emphatic use of retributive rhetoric was in the cases of clemency for people targeted by the Mueller investigation.

Perhaps these justifications were really aimed at clearing Trump's own name, for if the people targeted by Mueller were innocent or unfairly targeted, so was he. In this sense, as in many other arenas, Trump's clemencies were often as much about him as those whose sentences he commuted or the people he pardoned. As Trump put it in explaining why he pardoned Flynn: “The whole thing turned out to be a scam, and it turned out to be a disgrace to our country, and it was a takedown of a duly elected President.”

Administration of Donald J. Trump, 2020 Remarks in a Roundtable Discussion on the Positive Impact of Law Enforcement and an Exchange With Reporters, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents 13 (2020).