On Wednesday, President Donald Trump has issued pardons and sentence commutations for 29 people, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Trump commuted Stone's sentence earlier this year.
The list of pardons includes Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared. In the early 2000s, Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 counts of tax evasion, one count of retaliating against a federal witness, and another count of lying to the Federal Election Commission.
In total, Trump has granted clemency to 49 people in the last two days, many of them allies or other loyalists.
The pardons Wednesday of Manafort and Roger Stone, who months earlier had his sentence commuted by Trump, were particularly notable, underscoring the president’s desire to chip away at the results and legacy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. He has now pardoned five people convicted in that investigation, four of them associates like former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, both of whom pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
“The pardons from this President are what you would expect to get if you gave the pardon power to a mob boss,” tweeted Andrew Weissmann, a Mueller team member who helped prosecute Manafort.
Even members of the president’s own party raised eyebrows, with Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska issuing a brief statement that said: “This is rotten to the core.”
Both Stone and Manafort were convicted on charges stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
"Mr. President, my family & I humbly thank you for the Presidential Pardon you bestowed on me," Manafort wrote on Twitter in his first post since Dec. 2016. "Words cannot fully convey how grateful we are."
Trump did not pardon Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, who was sentenced last year to 45 days in prison after extensively cooperating with prosecutors, or former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes related to his efforts to buy the silence of women who said they had sexual relationships with Trump. Both were also convicted in the Mueller probe.
New York City prosecutors, meanwhile, have been seeking to have the state’s highest court revive state mortgage fraud charges against Manafort after a lower court dismissed them on double jeopardy grounds. A spokesman for District Attorney Cy Vance said the pardon “underscores the urgent need to hold Mr. Manafort accountable for his crimes against the People of New York.”
Manafort and Stone are hardly conventional pardon recipients, in part because both were scolded by judges for effectively thumbing their nose at the criminal justice system as their cases were pending. Manafort was accused of witness tampering even after he was indicted and was accused by prosecutors of lying while trying to earn credit for cooperation.
Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress about his efforts to gain inside information about the release by WikiLeaks of Russia-hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign, was similarly censured by a judge because of his social media posts.
In a statement Wednesday, Stone thanked Trump and alleged that he had been subjected to a “Soviet-style show trial on politically-motivated charges”
Kushner is the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a wealthy real estate executive who pleaded guilty years ago to tax evasion and making illegal campaign donations. Trump and the elder Kushner knew each other from real estate circles and their children were married in 2009.
Prosecutors allege that after Kushner discovered that his brother-in-law was cooperating with authorities, he hatched a revenge and intimidation scheme. They say he hired a prostitute to lure his brother-in-law, then arranged to have a secret recording of the encounter in a New Jersey motel room sent to his own sister, the man’s wife.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has called it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he ever prosecuted as U.S. attorney.
Trump’s legally troubled allies were not the only recipients of clemency. The list of 29 recipients included people whose pleas for forgiveness have been promoted by people supporting the president throughout his term in office, among them former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
On Tuesday, Trump announced a flurry of lame duck pardons and commutations as his presidential term winds down, including a pair of former Republican congressmen and two men who pleaded guilty in Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
The pardons announced Tuesday night include former Republican Reps. Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins.
Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump to be president, was sentenced to two years and two months in federal prison after admitting he helped his son and others dodge $800,000 in stock market losses when he learned that a drug trial by a small pharmaceutical company had failed.
Hunter was sentenced to 11 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing campaign funds and spending the money on everything from outings with friends to his daughter’s birthday party.
Trump also commuted the sentence of former Republican Rep. Steve Stockman, who was convicted in 2018 for misusing charitable funds.
Trump also announced a pardon for George Papadopoulos, his 2016 campaign adviser whose conversation unwittingly helped trigger the Russia investigation that shadowed Trump’s presidency for nearly two years.
By pardoning Papadopoulos, Trump once again took aim at special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and is part of a broader effort by Trump to undo the results of the investigation that yielded criminal charges against a half-dozen associates.
Last month, Trump pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI; months earlier, Trump commuted the sentence of Stone, just days before he was to report to prison.
In the group announced Tuesday night were four former government contractors convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad that left more a dozen Iraqi civilians dead and caused an international uproar over the use of private security guards in a war zone.
Supporters of Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard, the former contractors at Blackwater Worldwide, had lobbied for pardons, arguing that the men had been excessively punished in an investigation and prosecution they said was tainted by problems and withheld exculpatory evidence. All four were serving lengthy prison sentences.
The shootings of civilians by Blackwater employees at a crowded Baghdad traffic circle in September 2007 prompted an international outcry, left a reputational black eye on U.S. operations at the height of the Iraq war and put the government on the defensive over its use of private contractors in military zones. The resulting criminal prosecutions spanned years in Washington but came to an abrupt end Tuesday when President Donald Trump pardoned the convicted contractors, an act that human rights activists and some Iraqis decried as a miscarriage of justice.
The news comes at a delicate moment for the Iraqi leadership, which is trying to balance growing calls by some Iraqi factions for a complete U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq with what they see as the need for a more gradual drawdown.
“The infamous Blackwater company killed Iraqi citizens at Nisoor Square. Today we heard they were released upon personal order by President Trump, as if they don’t care for the spilled Iraqi blood,” said Saleh Abed, a Baghdad resident walking in the square.
The United Nations’ Human Rights office said Wednesday that it was “deeply concerned” by the pardons, which it said “contributes to impunity and has the effect of emboldening others to commit such crimes in the future.” The Iraqi Foreign Ministry said the pardons “did not take into account the seriousness of the crime committed,” and that it would urge the U.S. to reconsider.
Al-Razzaq, the father of the slain boy, told the BBC that the pardon decision “broke my life again.”
Lawyers for the contractors, who had aggressively defended the men for more than a decade, offered a different take.
They have long asserted that the shooting began only after the men were ambushed by gunfire from insurgents and then shot back in defense. They have pointed to problems with the prosecution — the first indictment was dismissed by a judge — and argued that the trial that ended with their convictions was tainted by false testimony and withheld evidence.
“Paul Slough and his colleagues didn’t deserve to spend one minute in prison,” said Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for one of the four pardoned defendants. “I am overwhelmed with emotion at this fantastic news.”
Though the circumstances of the shooting have long been contested, there is no question the Sept. 16, 2007, episode — which began after the contractors were ordered to create a safe evacuation route after a car bomb explosion — was a low point for U.S.-Iraqi relations, coming just years after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
The FBI and Congress opened investigations, and the State Department — which used the Blackwater firm to provide security for diplomats — ordered a review of practices. The guards would later be charged in the deaths of 14 civilians, including women and children, in what U.S. prosecutors said was a wild, unprovoked attack by sniper fire, machine guns and grenade launchers against unarmed Iraqis.
Robert Ford, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Iraq over five years, met with the widows and other relatives of the victims after the killings, handing out envelopes of money in compensation and formal U.S. apologies — though without admitting guilt since investigations were ongoing.
“It was one of the very worst occasions I can remember in my time” in Iraq, said Ford, who teaches at Yale University. “That was just horrible. We had killed these people’s relatives and they were still terribly grieving.”
A review of Blackwater’s own incident reports in 2007 by House Democrats found Blackwater contractors reported they engaged in 195 “escalation of force” shootings over the preceding two years — with Blackwater reporting its guards shooting first more than 80% of the time.
The 2007 killings in the Baghdad traffic circle were among many attacks, large and small, hitting civilians that served to turn even some initial Iraqi supporters of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow against Americans. In 2005, for instance, Marines were accused of killing 24 unarmed men, women and children in the western town of Haditha in anger over a car bomb attack. U.S. military prosecutions in those killings ended with no jail sentences.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.