That is what Trump called Joe Biden's pardon of his son. Then he used the same power to free a governor who sold a Senate seat, a sheriff who sold badges, a foreign president who moved cocaine by the ton, fraudsters who left their victims unpaid, donors who had given millions, and the men who beat police at the Capitol on his behalf. The pardon power is the president's alone, and every president has used it on friends. The question was never the number. It is who, and this is who.
These are not the trespassers. Each was convicted or charged with a serious crime, with real victims, and set loose by the stroke of a pen. Pardon wipes the conviction; Commutation ends the sentence but leaves it standing.
Most January 6 cases were minor, and that is the honest concession. These were not, and the overcharging defense does not reach them.
Those are the names. Behind them is the volume, the people freed in groups rather than one by one.
Ask why, and the answer is nearly always the same sentence: the person was a victim of a "weaponized" Biden Justice Department. The words barely change from one case to the next, and they are aimed at the prosecutors, not at any evidence that the person was innocent.
It gets used even where it cannot fit. Of Scott Jenkins, the sheriff a jury convicted of selling badges: "This Sheriff is a victim of an overzealous Biden Department of Justice, and doesn't deserve to spend a single day in jail." Of Henry Cuellar, a Democrat: "Crooked Joe used the FBI and DOJ to 'take out' a member of his own Party." Of Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, Trump said on 60 Minutes: "I don't know who he is... I hear he was a victim of weaponization by government." He pardoned a man he said he could not identify.
"Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry's daughters, will not like. Oh' well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!"
Trump on Truth Social, December 7, 2025, complaining that Cuellar declined to switch parties after the pardon. The tell is in the grievance: what the pardon was meant to buy was loyalty.
Behind the boilerplate is a process built for access. Reuters found that 96 percent of his second-term clemency grants did not meet the Justice Department's own guidelines; by ProPublica's count, only about 10 of some 1,600 recipients went through the pardon office at all. The rest came through back channels, and a paid industry grew up around them. The Wall Street Journal described a "pardon-shopping" market with a going rate near $1 million and success fees up to $6 million; one broker was charged with attempted extortion for trying to collect a pardon fee.
And the money sometimes arrives first. Trevor Milton gave more than $1.8 million before his pardon. Paul Walczak's mother gave $1 million and attended a $1-million-a-seat dinner weeks before his, and his pardon application itself pointed to her support. Across all the grants, by one tally, more than $1 billion in restitution and fines owed to victims was wiped away.
The reason this is more than a policy disagreement is that Trump spent years attacking other presidents for clemency that looks tame beside his own.
"Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!"
Truth Social, December 1, 2024, hours after Biden pardoned his son. Seven weeks later Trump freed the people he called "hostages." (The Hill)
"It is disgraceful. Many are guilty of MAJOR CRIMES!"
On Biden's preemptive pardons of officials including Anthony Fauci and General Mark Milley, January 20, 2025. He then pardoned more than 600 people charged with assaulting or obstructing police. (NBC News)
"Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!"
Twitter, January 26, 2017, on Obama's commutation. He went on to commute the sentences of men convicted of conspiring to oppose the government by force. (NPR)
He went further than criticism. In March 2025 he declared Biden's pardons "VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen," a claim legal scholars rejected, since the Constitution sets no signature requirement for a pardon at all. His own Justice Department opened an investigation into it, and quietly closed it a year later, having found no legal hook. (PBS)
The people who policed the Capitol, and several Republicans, said plainly what the pardons meant.
"Pardoning the people who went into the Capitol and beat up a police officer violently I think was a mistake, because it seems to suggest that's an OK thing to do."
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), January 26, 2025
"I do not support the pardons if they were given to people who committed violent crimes, including assaulting police officers or breaking windows to get into the Capitol."
Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), January 21, 2025
"a miserable miscarriage of justice [that] erases accountability for the criminals who have done irreparable damage to our nation."
Aquilino Gonell, former Capitol Police sergeant assaulted on January 6, using the same phrase Trump aimed at Biden
There are real arguments here, and the power itself is genuinely his. An honest reader should weigh them.
Granting all of it, the core holds. Controversial pardons are bipartisan and old. What is specific here is the combination: the scale, the violence rewarded, the donors rewarded, and a president pardoning an attack on the very government he now leads, after calling a son's pardon an abuse of justice.
The hardest fact about all of this is that there is no remedy. The pardon power is close to absolute. It covers any federal crime, cannot be reviewed by a court, and cannot be undone once a pardon is delivered. The only thing it cannot reach is impeachment, a limit the Framers wrote in precisely so a president could not pardon his way out of accountability to Congress.
Selling a pardon for cash would itself be a crime, bribery, even though the pardon would still stand. But no president has ever been charged for a pardon, and none ever faced real consequence for one. The check the Constitution leaves is not a court or a prosecutor. It is the voter, and the judgment of history.
A pardon is the most personal power a president holds. It is mercy and it is favor, and because no one can overrule it, it reveals what a president actually values when nothing is forcing his hand. Used on a son, Trump called it an abuse and a miscarriage of justice. Used on a traitor, he called it terrible. Used on people he said were soft on crime, he called it disgraceful.
Then he freed the people who beat the police on his behalf, commuted the men who plotted to oppose the government by force, and pardoned the donors, the fraudsters, and the foreign trafficker. The power was his to use. The words condemning it were his too. Both cannot be honest at once, and the record shows which one he meant.
Clemency counts reflect Justice Department records and tracker tallies current to mid-2026; the January 6 total is usually given as a range because cases are counted in different ways. Donation-to-pardon links are documented in timing and amount; no quid pro quo has been proven, and the page says so.
This page documents clemency granted by the administration from January 2025 through mid-2026, drawn from Justice Department records, court documents, and reporting. It distinguishes pardons from commutations, notes where January 6 defendants' later crimes were separate from the conduct pardoned, and treats donation-to-pardon links as a documented pattern of timing and amount rather than a proven exchange. Quotes from living people are reproduced as published and dated. The pardon power is the president's under Article II; nothing here asserts these grants were unlawful. Corrections welcome.