Cryptocurrency billionaires. Disgraced politicians. Reality TV stars. And hundreds of political allies.
Since taking office for a second term, United States President Donald Trump has issued more than 1,840 acts of clemency to a range of personalities.
Presidents have long stirred controversy in their choices of people to pardon. But experts argue that the way Trump has exercised his clemency power violates rules and norms in place for more than a century.
Now, they warn that pardons and commutations have become transactional, with Trump using them to reward those loyal to his agenda.
Some beneficiaries have been supporters of his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement, including the hundreds of rioters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
I looked it up and there was a good rationale based on fairness behind Biden’s pardons. Most of Biden’s pardons also weren’t really pardons, but commutations of sentences: “Context: The thousands pardoned on Friday were “serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today,” Biden’s statement said.” https://www.axios.com/2025/01/17/biden-presidential-pardons-clemency-record Which seems fair and also needed to me. Imagine having 10 years left to serve of your 20 years sentence, while new convicts only receive max 5 years for the same crime.
What Biden did with pardons was completely different from what Trump is doing with them.
Re commutations vs pardons, the same is true with Trump. Thousands more commutations than pardons.
Re “fairness”, do you think this pardon was fair?
“the owner of a Detroit-area Medicare billing company who orchestrated a $26 million Medicare fraud.”
“Cuyahoga County commissioner, served more than a decade in prison on corruption charges”
…and so on.
It’s not “completely different”, it’s the same old shit, just like when Bush or Trump or Clinton did the exact same thing
But you WANT him to be different… so here we are, in your own fantasy land. So nice here. Oblivion. Peace
And Trump does the following: “President Donald Trump signed off on several eyebrow-raising pardons this week, including a man whose daughter donated millions to his PAC and a convicted fraudster he had already freed from prison for a different fraud scheme during his first term”
Trump hands out pardons after blatant corruption & at the start of people’s sentences. Biden did not do that. That you want to portray Biden to be as bad as Trump, shows that apparently your fairness compass is very broken.
And that person who got pardoned after already serving 10 years of his prison sentence … 10 years is already a freaking long time for non violent crime, which also didn’t ruin anyone else’s lives. Sentences have to follow a gradiant along the severity of the crime, if not you end up with a broken system (like the USA one). Prison should be temporary, a chance for correction and rehabilitation, where the person one day gets released with another chance at living a quiet honest life. That you want that man to die in prison … Says a lot about you again.
Still the same, pardons and commutations for wealthy thieves abound with Presidents for decades.
That’s what makes Trump’s blatant corruption possible, you see. Years of blatant corruption leads to even more blatant corruption.
Ten years is not long enough for a corrupt politician stealing millions of dollars. You get more time from robbing a bank. What is worse? I believe stealing from your constituents is worse than stealing from a wealthy bank, don’t you??
But you go ahead and stand up for a 50-year politician who has sent many more non-violent people to prison for much longer (see his stance on “Drug War” and much more over the decades).
That says even more about you, who will you defend next??? Gross.
People like you make people like Trump inevitable.
So your idea of justice is to heavily sentence people for actions that are not related to the crime that they are being sentenced for. That’s not justice, that’s called vengeance.
And yes, someone defrauding the government should be sentenced less severely than someone who does a violent robbery. Violent robberies can get people killed and even if noone dies or gets wounded, the victims will still be traumatized. None of that can happen with white collar crime against a big organisation. That this difference isn’t obvious to you, should imo be a wake up call for yourself that you need to calm down and take some time to rethink some of the things that you belief.