Filed
12:00 p.m. EDT
05.31.2025
The president has remade the pardons process with seemingly one key principle in mind: “No MAGA left behind.”
Ed Martin speaks during a press conference on May 13, 2025, in Washington, D.C. President Trump appointed Martin to run the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
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Over the past two weeks, President Donald Trump has issued a wave of pardons and sentence reductions to dozens of political allies, campaign donors, law enforcement officials, and Republican politicians, among others. The moves mark a decisive departure from early-term clemency decisions by prior administrations, and appear to follow a clear principle: “No MAGA left behind.”
That pithy turn of phrase originates with Ed Martin, a right-wing political operative and Trump ally who now leads the president’s clemency efforts. Martin was appointed to run the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney after failing to win Senate confirmation as the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. Some Republican senators expressed discomfort with Martin’s close ties to the Jan. 6 insurrection and its participants, and did not support his bid for the role.
Martin was ceremonially sworn in on Wednesday, marking a dramatic change to the nature of the pardons’ office. For more than a century, career civil servants led the office, evaluating clemency petitions and making recommendations to the president based on legal and humanitarian criteria.
“The idea is to ensure that the president is receiving neutral and non-political advice about the use of his clemency power,” Liz Oyer, the pardon attorney before Martin, said on Reveal’s podcast, More To The Story, last week. Trump fired Oyer in March, hours after she refused to advance a pardon for actor Mel Gibson’s 2011 domestic violence conviction. Gibson is a close friend of Trump’s, and the president personally requested the pardon so that Gibson could regain his right to own a firearm, according to Oyer.
“That’s not something that was in the ordinary scope of my duties, nor is it something that I could do because I simply didn’t have enough information,” Oyer explained during the interview with Reveal.
The use of presidential clemency to benefit political allies and personal acquaintances is not new. Presidents have the constitutional authority to negate (pardon) or shorten (commute) any federal conviction or sentence as they see fit. And presidents from both parties have long used this power for several self-serving pardons, often at the end of their terms. That included unprecedented pardons issued by Joe Biden for his family members late last year.
Historically, these acts of clemency have functioned in parallel with — and distinctly apart from — the broader work of the pardon office, which can function as a “safety valve” for excessive sentences. Martin’s appointment seems to signal an end to that separation, however.
In what has become a theme of the second Trump administration, the partisan overhaul of the pardons’ office represents a more aggressive and bombastic version of efforts during Trump’s first term. In 2021, a pair of legal scholars concluded that Trump’s clemency decisions bypassed the pardon’s attorney more often than any president in history.
The recent swell of clemency activity reflects this new direction. Among those granted clemency this month were Todd and Julie Chrisley, reality television stars who were convicted in 2022 of tax evasion and defrauding banks of more than $30 million.
Their daughter, Savannah Chrisley, had been a vocal advocate for their release, appearing on “My View with Lara Trump” — hosted by the president’s daughter-in-law — and speaking at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Beyond politics, the Chrisleys’ pardons align with Trump’s longstanding fascination with reality television, celebrity and physical appearance. “You guys don’t look like terrorists to me,” Trump said of the family, according to the younger Chrisley.
Trump also pardoned Scott Jenkins, a Virginia sheriff sentenced earlier this year to 10 years in prison for taking more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for handing out deputy badges to campaign donors and other associates untrained in law enforcement. This pardon fits into Trump’s broader pattern of eliminating and reversing federal efforts to hold law enforcement accountable for misconduct.
In some cases, clemency has delivered not just freedom, but significant financial benefits. When Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive convicted of evading nearly $11 million in payroll taxes, the decision eliminated nearly $4.4 million in court-ordered restitution to the U.S. government. The Chrisleys, similarly, are now potentially exempt from any of the yet unpaid $17 million in restitution they owed.
Walczak’s pardon came after his mother attended a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The New York Times reported that Walczak’s clemency application included long sections boasting of his mother’s extensive political donations to Republicans, and of her efforts to publish the private diary of Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley.
The Trump administration has not commented on every single pardon, but has generally defended the decisions by arguing that political allies who have received pardons were unfairly targeted by Democrat-appointed prosecutors.
Some of Trump’s recent acts of clemency have less obvious political salience, including a commutation for Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover on conspiracy, drug trafficking and other charges, as well as a pardon for the Louisiana rapper NBA YoungBoy on gun charges. While Hoover has been a pet cause for Trump ally Ye (formerly Kanye West), neither man has clear personal or political connections to the president. On social media, some have viewed Trump’s move as a cynical plot to ingratiate himself and the broader MAGA movement with Black men.
In any event, both are quite famous — or perhaps infamous in Hoover’s case. That’s not true of most clemency applicants. As of last month, the pardon attorney had a backlog of nearly 8,000 clemency petitions, many from people serving long sentences for nonviolent offenses. With the office seemingly now focused on the president’s allies and big names, it remains to be seen whether those other applicants will ever receive a serious review.
