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Resigned US President Donald Trump pardoned 15 convicts on Tuesday, including several Republican allies and security personnel involved in the 2007 Baghdad massacre. He also commuted his sentence to five more convicts.
While it is unusual for a resigning president to pardon convicts, Trump has previously stated that he will intervene without remorse on behalf of friends or allies he believes have been wrongfully convicted.
He was pardoned, for example Chris collins a former Republican member of New York who has been sentenced to twenty-six months in prison for disclosure of inside information, falsification of documents and perjury, or Duncan hunter a former California Republican who was sentenced to eleven months for stealing campaign money.
A White House spokesman explained the amnesties “calling on many members of Congress” and, in Duncan Hunter’s case, “serving the nation with the Marines and witnessing fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Trump pardoned two people convicted of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election campaign. One George Papadopoulos, who was Trump’s campaign advisor four years ago and was sentenced to fourteen days for misleading the committee that investigated the Russian intervention.
Other Alex van der Zwaan a Dutch lawyer sentenced to thirty days in prison for lying to investigators Robert Mueller during a study led by a special advisor. The president had previously pardoned two convicts who were charged in this investigation.
Among those amnestied on Tuesday were four employees of the government-contracted security company Blackwater Worldwide who participated in the 2007 Baghdad massacre and killed fourteen Iraqi civilians. It caused international outrage when the United States deployed people from private security companies to a war zone. The four implicated were sentenced to long prison terms. His supporters pressured the president on the grounds that they had been punished too harshly.
Trump is not so merciful to everyone: This year, after a 17-year hiatus, he ordered the resumption of federal executions, with the execution of 10 death sentences, despite support for the death penalty in the country decreased.
A BBC article revealed that, looking back 130 years, there were not as many executions under any US president as there were under Trump. And after the resignation of the outgoing president, he also accelerated the executions: the president ordered the execution of five death sentences until the transfer of power.
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