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The president of the United States does not seem to want to resign without getting into some more controversy. After granting 15 pardons on Tuesday night, 24 hours later he granted pardons to 29 more people. On the list of figures is a former campaign manager, former adviser and father-in-law of Donald Trump’s daughter.
With less than a month to officially resign, Democrat Joe Biden took office on January 20, Donald Trump does not do things by half. In the United States there is a “wave” of pardons that includes personalities who were already part of the close circle of the current US president. On Wednesday night, 29 people received Trump’s pardon: 26 of them with a total pardon, are free and the other three had commutations, that is, a reduced sentence.
One of the lucky winners of the new “wave” is Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, who was sentenced in 2018 in the Justice Department investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Manafort was serving a sentence of seven and a half years in prison for financial fraud and conspiracy and obstruction of justice to avoid his investigation. He had been under house arrest since May due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Follow Roger Stone on the list, a friend and former adviser to the US president, who was accused in February 2020 of lying to Congress about contacts made with the Wikileaks website, which launched harmful emails to the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democrat who ran against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
If this year, Trump had already interceded for his friend to have the prison sentence reduced, this time he granted him a full pardon. According to the US press, Stone has advised the US president to forgive Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, and Edward Snowden, a former CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) analyst who disclosed classified and confidential material.
Donald Trump wanted to keep the pardons also within the immediate family. Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, husband of Ivanka Trump, received the presidential pardon. The real estate mogul was sentenced to two years in prison in 2004 for tax evasion, witness tampering and campaign finance crimes.
One of the most talked about incidents of Charles Kushner was when, after learning that his brother-in-law was collaborating with the authorities, he hired a prostitute to seduce his own sister’s husband: he recorded the moment and sent him the video.
Some US media say that the US president can continue to benefit the family in the final days of his term, by granting a presidential pardon to three of his children, his son-in-law and even himself. The list of pardons, which includes friends and figures close to Trump’s circle, has been considered “strange” by some political analysts, who caution that the contents of the pardon do not necessarily have to be made public.
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