Margo Oge, a former director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the US Environmental Protection Agency, said: “These pardons don’t just forgive a paperwork violation – they reward people who ran businesses stripping pollution controls off diesel trucks for profit”.
She added that the devices “released far more nitrogen oxides, which worsen asthma and drive up heart attacks and hospitalisations … That’s the protection these individuals were undermining – clean air we breathe.”
Trump also pardoned Adam Kidan, a major Republican donor and business partner of infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the kingpin of a massive corruption scandal that rocked Washington in the 2000s.
Kidan in 2005 pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud and mail fraud conspiracy charges related to his purchase of a line of cruise ships for offshore gambling. Kidan was sentenced to nearly six years in prison in 2006 but was released in 2009.
According to federal elections records, Kidan – who now runs a staffing agency – has donated nearly US$4 million ($7m) to Republican Party campaigns and committees since 2017, including those associated with Trump.
Jack Harvard, a former Plano, Texas, mayor who was convicted of bank fraud charges in the 1990s, was also pardoned. The White House official said that Harvard “turned his life around” following his conviction, “protecting and raising endangered animals on his ranch, and allowing the US military and Nato troops to train on his land free of charge”.
Over the first 18 months of his second term in office, Trump has wielded his clemency powers to grant relief to a wide array of convicts – many of them politically connected – outside of the traditional pardon-application process.
The day he was inaugurated for a second term, Trump pardoned most January 6 defendants – a sweeping action that granted clemency to more than 1500 convicted in connection with the riot at the US Capitol in 2021, including those who assaulted police officers.
Every recent president has exercised the pardon power to benefit their allies, but legal experts have told the Washington Post that Trump’s use of clemency has bucked the norms of the process.
Trump has pardoned some of the most high-profile public corruption and white-collar defendants prosecuted during President Joe Biden’s administration, as well as some prosecuted during his own first term and some under earlier administrations.
His list of clemency recipients includes a number of politicians: former Republican congressman George Santos of New York, Democrat Henry Cuellar of Texas and former Republican Tennessee state senator Brian Kelsey.
Trump, who pledged during the campaign to crack down on the illegal flow of deadly drugs coming across the border, also granted clemency to several individuals convicted for drug-related crimes, including Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover, Baltimore drug kingpin Garnett Gilbert Smith and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez.
Trump has defended his use of the pardons, saying the people he granted clemency had been pursued by what he considered to be a corrupt and overzealous Justice Department under Biden. But the lawyers interviewed said they investigated each case scrupulously and apolitically to ensure a fair prosecution.
During his first term in office, Trump issued 238 total acts of clemency.
Biden issued more acts of clemency than any other president. By the end of his term in 2025, he had granted a total of 4245 pardons and commutations.
Typically, Justice Department employees vet tens of thousands of applications, only recommending to the president people who have completed their sentences and shown contrition.
Trump, however, has pardoned criminals without any such vetting, sometimes granting clemency to convicts who have not admitted wrongdoing or started their sentences.
Trump and his allies have pointed to Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter as an example of how Trump’s predecessors politicised the pardon process.
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