President Donald Trump unleashed a new wave of pardon on Wednesday night for his allies, including his son-in-law’s father, Charles Kushner, and his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who lied to investigators investigating Russian electoral interference.
The lame duck president – who for the past few days seemed determined to cause as much shock and confusion as possible before leaving office on January 20 – also forgave Roger Stone, whose sentence he commuted in July, and the wife of the disgraced former Rep. Duncan Hunter, whom he pardoned on Tuesday.
The entire string of pardons for Christmas week – including former Blackwater guards charged with war crimes, two border agents accused of hiding a shooting, and some more traditional candidates – seemed designed to reward devoted loyalists at a time when Trump became the Republican. support for his bid to undermine the election and is busy clashing heads with Congress.
“By pardoning Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Charles Kushner, President Trump has made it clear that he believes the purpose of the pardon is to save wealthy white men associated with him,” said Noah Bookbinder, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. said in one statement. “Trump has turned an instrument of mercy and justice into just another way of being corrupt.”
Trump’s actions were also denounced by his former attorney, Michael Cohen, who was sentenced to jail time for fraud despite his cooperation in the Mueller investigation into possible collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia to interfere with the Trump campaign. 2016 elections.
US Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), a Trump critic, was succinct in his assessment: “This is rotten to the core.”
Trump’s pardon of Manafort was largely expected in light of his repeated praise for the convicted fraudster and complaints that he had been a victim of the Russian ‘hoax’.
For more than a year now, Trump has sporadically raised in private conversations how “cruel” and unfair it was for Manafort to be held in solitary confinement, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the case. In his miniries on the subject, Trump would suggest it borders on “torture” of a political prisoner – even though he has never made the inhumanity of solitary confinement a policy priority or even tweeted about less connected prisoners who endure it.
In a statement late Wednesday, the White House pushed for the idea that Manafort had been punished for his connection to the president.
“As a result of the blatant prosecution of the prosecution, Mr. Manafort has endured years of unfair treatment and is one of the most prominent victims of what has been revealed as perhaps the greatest witch hunt in US history,” he said.
Manafort responded to his grace through writing his first tweet in years to praise Trump. “Mr. President, my family and I humbly thank you for the presidential pardon you have granted me. Words cannot fully express how grateful we are,” he wrote, telling Trump that he “Make America Great Again” did and “achieved more in four years than all your predecessors today.”
Some commentators were quick to note that the grace may have a downside.
Beware of what you wish – the people who are pardoned no longer enjoy the privilege of the Fifth Amendment. This means they can be forced to testify about anything. Get your popcorn … ”tweeted Rep. David Cicillin (D-RI).
In that vein, Andrew Weissman, one of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s deputies tweeted, “ Easy enough to beat Trump at his game: Put Stone and Manafort on the grand jury after 1/20/2021 to get what they’ve hidden from the Trump administration – and then if they lie, they could be prosecuted for perjury and obstruction. “
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, who was charged last year against Manafort on charges and is appealing the dismissal under the double danger rule, said the pardon for his federal crimes makes the New York case all the more important.
“This action underscores the urgent need to hold Mr. Manafort accountable for his crimes against the people of New York, as claimed in our indictment, and we will continue our appeals,” Vance said in a statement.
As with Manafort, the White House tried to justify Stone’s pardon by portraying the unrepentant filthy impostor as a helpless victim who was “treated very unfairly” by Mueller’s investigators.
Trump’s confidant was convicted of lying to Congress, tampering with witnesses and obstructing the home investigation into interference in the Russian election. The president commuted his 40-month sentence in the summer.
“Forgiving him will help rectify the injustices he faced at the hands of the Mueller investigation,” said the White House.
Charles Kushner, senior White House adviser to Jared Kushner’s father, was released from prison in 2006 after serving two years for tax evasion and witness tampering. He was charged with hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law so that he could videotape the meeting and then send it to his sister to keep her from testifying before a grand jury.
His prosecution was overseen by then-American attorney Chris Christie, who naturally became one of Trump’s biggest supporters. Christie, who believes Jared Kushner orchestrated his ouster from Trump’s transition team as a reward for the prosecution, has long maintained that the father deserved what he got.
“It is one of the most disgusting and disgusting crimes I have prosecuted,” Christie has said in the past, who could not be reached for comment on the pardon.
On December 22, Trump pardoned a slew of others, including former campaign manager George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to Mueller’s team during the investigation in Russia; former US representatives Chris Collins (insider trading) and Steve Stockman (campaign fraud); and four Blackwater mercenaries were found guilty of slaughtering more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in 2014. Just before Thanksgiving, the president granted leniency to Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser to plead guilty – twice – to lying to the FBI.
The pardon was cheered in Trumpworld. “Paul has paid a price for his crimes,” Ed Brookover, a former senior advisor to Trump’s 2016 campaign who worked with Manafort, told The Daily Beast. “Unfortunately, during the baseless Mueller investigation, Paul was also unfairly accused and convicted by the media for many other cases.”
Manafort, 71, has been convicted of numerous financial crimes related to his lobbying for pro-Russian political entities in Ukraine, and he pleaded guilty to a case involving obstruction of the Mueller investigation. He was sentenced to seven and a half years, but was allowed to serve the remainder of his term in house arrest in May due to COVID-19 fears in prison.
Over the course of several years, which partially overlapped with his implementation of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Manafort made millions by advising Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. In 2016, Ukrainian researchers found handwritten ledgers with more than $ 12 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort from Yanukovych’s party for work related to influencing the election in favor of Yanukovych.
The ledgers were first made public by a Ukrainian investigative journalist and then by the country’s national anti-corruption agency. Data obtained by the Associated Press in 2017 showed that at least $ 1.2 million in 2007 and 2009 payments that are in one of those ledgers – known as the “black ledger” – were received by his consulting firm .
Despite these documents, Manafort continued to publicly question the authenticity of the ledger after it was revealed. Some in the media – most notably right-wing columnist John Solomon, who is known to have spread unverified theories about Ukraine – claimed the ledger was faked and that George Soros was somehow behind the original leak. Solomon’s stories about Ukraine were closely related to those that Rudy Giuliani put forward at the time. Others followed Solomon’s lead. Republican attorney Joe DiGenova, who at one point represented Solomon, accused Soros in Fox Business interviews of controlling the State Department and the FBI in an attempt to influence politics in Kiev.
In his 2019 conviction on the allegations of obstruction, which added 43 months to the four years pronounced for the financial fraud, Manafort told Judge Amy Berman Jackson, “I’m sorry for what I did. Let me be very clear, I accept responsibility for the actions that have brought me here today. “
Jackson was largely unmoved.
“It’s hard to overestimate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved,” she told him, adding, “Saying ‘I’m sorry I got caught’ is not an inspirational plea for leniency. “
Trump is reportedly considering further pardons on the way out and is said to have spoken of pardons not only to members of his family to avoid possible future prosecutions, but also to himself. While virtually all U.S. presidents of both parties have granted pardons and diminished sentences before resigning, Trump has been astonishingly brutal about using his power of pardon to help friends and repay employees he considers personally loyal.
As his departure from the White House approaches, Trump is reportedly dealing with numerous requests from hopeful pardon seekers. Those who want to be left off the hook for past crimes are said to be Joe Exotic, the incarcerated Tiger King star, and former Trump campaign adviser Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators during the Russia investigation.
Former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who was indicted by a grand jury in New York for financial fraud, is also considered one of the contenders for a possible pardon. Trump also allegedly weighed in on granting preemptive pardons to some of his own family members under legal investigation, as well as his attorney Rudy Giuliani.