US President Donald Trump pardoned 77 people involved in attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, which Joe Biden clearly won, but Trump never conceded, in the early hours of this Monday (Washington time).
I still don’t. The highest profile pardon is that of former New York mayor and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. The announcement was made on X by Ed Martin, the White House attorney in charge of the pardon. Martin, in whose personal account on that social network he defines himself, among other things, as “Trump’s political persecution czar”, published a four-page document, a “proclamation ending a grave national injustice perpetrated against the American people after the 2020 election”. He also defines it as “a further step in the process of national reconciliation”.
The document, signed by the President of the United States last Friday, continues: “I, DONALD J. TRUMP, grant a full, total and unconditional pardon to all citizens of the United States for conduct related to advising, creating, arranging, carrying out, submitting, supporting, voting for, acting on, or defending any slate of presidential electors… in connection with the 2020 presidential election.”
This is a symbolic pardon, as none of the individuals included are accused of federal crimes, so the president has no power to pardon them. To break the news, Martin did so by replying to one of his messages onwards
In addition to Giuliani, to whom his former ally promised the United States’ highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the list includes lawyer Sydney Powell, who was the face of Trump’s Big Lie after his election defeat in the weeks leading up to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesboro and the president’s then chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
The gesture, which has no legal consequences, can be interpreted as a new expression of the score-settling policy with which Trump returned to the White House. On his first day in the Oval Office, he pardoned about 1,600 prisoners accused of crimes related to the storming of the Capitol. Since then he has used forgiveness for collaborators, friends or personalities close to him in the MAGA world.
The pardon announced on Monday is also part of Trump’s efforts to contradict the conclusions of the House of Representatives commission, made up of Democrats and Republicans, which investigated for 18 months between 2021 and 2022 what happened on January 6, the day in which a crowd of Republican followers stormed the Capitol to prevent the certification of the electoral votes collected by Biden and, therefore, give him the presidency.
