WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned 15 people, including a pair of congressional Republicans, a 2016 campaign official and former government contractor caught in a Russian investigation and convicted in the 2007 genocide in Baghdad.
Trump’s actions in his final week in office show a president who has been unjustified by the legal system to loyalists and others whom he considers to be partisans against him and his allies. Not an unusual act for an outgoing president – Trump issued an apology – who publicly refused to accept his election defeat to Democrat Jid Biden, who was sworn in on January 20.
Trump is likely to apologize more before then. He and his colleagues have discussed many other possibilities, including members of Trump’s family and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Those pardoned on Tuesday include two of the early GOP legislators to support Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Duncan Hunter of California and Chris Collins of New York. Trump is a former rapist from Texas. The sentences of five others, including Steve Stockman, were also commuted.
Collins, the first member of Congress to support Trump to become president, was sentenced to two years and two months in federal prison when he reportedly helped his son and others sink $ 800,000 in stock market losses when he learned that by a small pharmaceutical The drug trial company failed.
Hunter was sentenced to 11 months in prison after being convicted of stealing campaign funds and spending everything from hanging out with friends at his daughter’s birthday party.
White House Press Secretary Kyle McKinney said Hunter and Collins were allowed to pardon “at the request of several members of Congress.” She noted that Hunter was a U.S. citizen. Served the nation in the Marines and saw fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The group, announced Tuesday night, included four former government contractors convicted of the 2007 genocide in Baghdad, sparking an international outcry over the use of private security guards on the battlefield.
Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this report available online. All four were serving long prison sentences.
The amnesties reflect a clear desire to give American service members and contractors the benefit of the doubt when it comes to acts of violence in the field of war against civilians. Last November, for example, he pardoned a former U.S. Army commando who is due to go on trial next year for ordering a suspected Afghan bomb maker and former Army lieutenant convicted of murder to fire on three Afghans.
Trump also announced an apology for two people caught up in Special Adviser Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. It was for a 2016 campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, who was convicted of lying to communicate with the FBI, in which he learned that Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, was being tainted by Russia. The president also pardoned Dutch lawyer Alex van der Zoan, who was sentenced to 30 days in prison for lying to investigators during Mueller’s investigation.
Van der Zwan and Papadopoulos are the third and fourth Russia investigation suspects to be cleared. Forgiving them, Trump once again set out to interrogate Mueller and launched a comprehensive effort to undo the results of an investigation into criminal charges against half a dozen allies.
The apologists criticized the top Democrats. Chairman of the House Permanent Selection Committee of Intelligence, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California., Said the president was abusing his power.
“Trump is not based on the interests of repentance, compensation or justice, but to reward his friends and political allies, to protect those who lie to denounce them, to shelter those convicted of killing civilians, and to weaken investigations exposing large-scale malpractices.” ”Schiff said.
Last month, Trump pardoned former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and sentenced another colleague, Roger Stone, months earlier, just days before he was jailed.
Trump has granted the 2% waiver he requested in his single term in office – just before Tuesday’s announcement. By comparison, Barack Obama has 212 or 6%, and George W. Bush approved about 7% or 189. Another term president, George HW Bush, made 10% of the requests.
Among those pardoned by Trump was Utah State Representative Phil Lyman, who protested the ATV through restricted federal territories.
Lemon served as Utah County Commissioner in 2014 when he drove about AT0 ATV riders into a valley of Native American cliff habitat, which authorities blocked off motor traffic. The ride came as pressure mounted against federal control of most of the land in the west, and Nevada rancher Cleven Bundy had an armed confrontation with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing fees.
Lyman spent 10 days in prison and was ordered to pay about $ 96,000 in damages. The Trump administration lifted the ban on motor vehicles in parts of the valley in 2017 but left the limit in other areas where Lehman led his ride.
Two former U.S. border patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Campion, were also acquitted for shooting and wounding a Mexican drug smuggler near El Paso, Texas in 2005.
Others on the list include a Pittsburgh dentist who pleaded guilty to health care fraud, two women convicted of drug offenses and now 89-year-old Alfred Lee Krum, who in 1952 illegally helped his wife’s uncle to moonshine for 19 years. Was.
Served three years probation and fined $ 250. The White House said Krum has maintained a clean record for nearly 70 years and attended the same church for 60 years, raised four children, and regularly participated in charity fundraising events.
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The report is co-authored by Zick Miller, Jill Colvin, Michael Balsamo in Washington and Mitchell Price in Las Vegas.
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