For more than a decade, Donald Trump has tied his political fortune to many false claims. But perhaps the most consistent is his recurring idea that other countries are emptying prisons and mental institutions and sending the inmates and patients to the United States — for which there is no evidence. What is especially striking is that it is he who is in fact turning convicts loose — even ones who were prosecuted during his own first term as president.
From the ridiculous — former U.S. Representative George Santos — to the downright dangerous — the convicted drug-trafficking Honduran ex-President Juan Orlando Hernandez — Mr. Trump has made an art of opening the jailhouse doors.
Going back to the beginning of his second term, President Trump vacated charges against about 1,500 people convicted or who pleaded guilty in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Among these were more than 600 accused of assaulting law officers or of resisting, impeding, or obstructing law enforcement; 174 were alleged to have carried weapons or injured officers. One, a North Carolina man, has subsequently faced charges of child pornography and sexual assault of a preadolescent girl.
An unremorseful Mr. Santos had been serving a seven-year prison sentence for fraud and identity theft when the president’s pardon arrived. Texas Representative Henry Cuellar was pardoned last week after he was charged last year with bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy. He is but one of at least 11 former members of Congress Mr. Trump has let off the hook.
He pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative commentator, after his conviction for making campaign contributions in other people’s names. In October, he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a billionaire with connections to the Trump family’s crypto investments who had pleaded guilty to money laundering. The president is also stiffing victims; a former federal pardon attorney told ABC News that the recipients of Trump’s second-term clemency had been cumulatively owed more than $1 billion in restitution — money that now will never reach them.
It is worth reading the transcript of an interview from Monday conducted by Dasha Burns, a former NBC News reporter and now Politico’s chief White House correspondent. What comes across clearly is that this is a guy incapable of managing his own thoughts, much less the complexity, say, of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But what he had to say about Honduran ex-President Hernandez was revealing. Note that prosecutors said he had helped bring more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States, and that the Justice Department once said he was at the center of one of the “largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world”:
“Well, I don’t know him. And I know very little about him other than people said it was like, uh, an Obama-Biden type setup, where he was set up . . . there are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know. And they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said I’ll do it.”
Just three hours elapsed between the time Roger Stone, who had been convicted on multiple federal felonies himself, sent a letter recommending a pardon for Mr. Hernandez before it was granted. This is insane. Few Americans should want a president who can so easily be led around by the ring in his nose. Whenever it rights itself again, Congress should give serious consideration to amending the Constitution to put limits on the executive’s pardon power.