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A little less than a month after the end of his term, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, has pardoned 15 people convicted of various crimes and reduced the sentence to another five. Among those pardoned there are two who pleaded guilty during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, the so-called “Russiagate”, and four who were part of the private military company Blackwater and who were convicted of the murder. of civilians during the Iraq war in 2007.
The White House made the decision public in a statement issued Tuesday night. Under the Constitution, the president can grant pardons to anyone, with very few restrictions. Generally, however, clemency candidates are evaluated by the Department of Justice, which compiles a list of individuals who are eligible to receive it. There are currently 14,000 people waiting for clemency in the United States. Trump, however, has so far almost always ignored the Justice Department’s recommendations, preferring to benefit people associated with him, or his political allies, with acts of leniency. Even in the latter cases, he wrote the New York Times, more than half of the beneficiaries would not meet the informal criteria normally considered to grant clemency.
According to research by a Harvard Law School professor cited by New York TimesOf the 45 acts of clemency previously granted by Trump (excluding therefore those of Tuesday), 88 percent were granted to people who have direct ties to the president or who are functional for the achievement of his political objectives. Other presidents had used forgiveness to help people related to them, for example, Bill Clinton pardoned his half brother convicted of possession and trafficking of cocaine, but no one has done it with the same consistency as Trump.
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The pardons involved in the Russiagate investigation are George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan. Of the two, the former is definitely the more famous: he was a foreign policy advisor to Trump’s 2016 election campaign and, according to journalistic reconstructions, the entire Russiagate investigation began with some of his rash talks, made while he was drunk in a Pub. London. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October 2017 to lying to the FBI and spent 12 days in jail. Subsequently, he wrote a book in which he declared himself a victim of the “deep state”, that is, the alleged and non-existent secret apparatus that opposes Trump within the administration, and on several occasions apologized to Trump, to clear his record criminal. .
The less famous Alex van der Zwaan is a Dutch lawyer who worked with Paul Manafort, the head of Trump’s election campaign: He was sentenced to 30 days in prison in April 2018 for lying during the Russiagate investigation.
With these two acts of clemency, Trump continued his work to dismantle the results of the Russian interference investigation, which was led by special counsel Robert Mueller and which he continues to judge as an act of unjustified persecution and a hoax. Even in the announcement of the clemency, the White House specified that the investigation could not prove the collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and that the clemency measures “help to correct the wrongs committed by the Mueller team to many people.”
Trump has already granted clemency and other leniency measures to people involved in Russiagate: In November he pardoned Michael Flynn, his former National Security adviser, who pleaded guilty multiple times in the investigation, among other things. for lying to the FBI. A few months earlier, he had commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, his adviser and friend, sentenced to 40 months in prison for various crimes, including obstruction of justice and perjury. In this way, Stone avoided jail. According to the US media, before the end of his term Trump could also pardon Paul Manafort, convicted of tax crimes but also involved in the Mueller investigation.
– Read also: What’s in the “Mueller Report”
Trump, we said, also pardoned four members of the private military company Blackwater involved in the killings of civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, in 2007. The four men were part of a team sent to escort a US convoy and, according to reconstructions From the investigations, he opened fire on civilians without a concrete threat, also using machine guns and stun grenades, and killed 17 people, including two children aged 8 and 11. One of the four, Nicholas Slatten, had been sentenced to life imprisonment because, according to the investigation, he was the first to shoot. The other three had been sentenced to 30 years in prison each. The Nisour Square massacre is remembered as one of the most symbolic events of the war in Iraq, which hit Iraqi confidence in the United States hard.
During his presidency, Trump has often defended military men accused of war crimes, such as former Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, but these acts of leniency also have a direct connection to him: The former boss of Blackwater is Erik Prince. a billionaire and his strong supporter. Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is Secretary of Education.
Finally, among the other notorious pardons are three former Republican MPs, two of whom were Trump supporters from the start: Duncan Hunter, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 11 months in prison for using his campaign funds for business. individuals, including vacations and expenses related to an extramarital affair, and Chris Collins, sentenced to 26 months for insider trading and lying to the FBI. Collins had also pleaded guilty. The third former Republican congressman is Steve Stockman, convicted of keeping hundreds of thousands of dollars for public interest projects. His pardon was supported among others by Sidney Powell, the lawyer involved in recent weeks in Trump’s attempt to subvert the outcome of the presidential election.
– Read also: The man who guessed the password to Trump’s Twitter account was exonerated
These acts of leniency are most likely not the last of the Trump presidency. According to Washington Post, Trump reportedly told his aides that he intends to use his power of grace extensively before the end of his term, and the White House has received a large number of clemency requests from members of Congress, lawyers, lobbyists, and various supporters. of the president.
According to the media, Trump is also reflecting on the possibility of granting his collaborators and relatives a preventive pardon, which protects them from future investigations into alleged crimes committed up to the moment of the pardon. It is a power that the law grants to the President, although it has been used on rare occasions, for example, by President Gerald Ford to protect his predecessor Richard Nixon from investigations into the Watergate scandal. Trump is even thinking about forgiving himself, but there is no precedent for this and the case law is much less clear.
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