‘Bribery for pardon’ plan investigated

The US Justice Department is investigating whether there was a secret scheme to lobby White House officials for a pardon as well as a related plot to offer a hefty political contribution in exchange for clemency, according to a court document unsealed yesterday.

Most of the information in the 18-page court order is redacted, including the identity of the people prosecutors are investigating, and who the proposed pardon might be intended for.

But the document from August does reveal that people are suspected of having acted to secretly lobby White House officials to secure a pardon or sentence commutation – and that, in a related scheme, a substantial political contribution was floated in exchange for a pardon.

As part of the investigation, more than 50 laptops, iPads and other digital devices have been seized, according to the document.

The existence of the investigation was revealed in a court order from US District Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of Washington’s federal court, in which she granted investigators access to certain email communications connected to the alleged schemes that she said were not protected by attorney-client privilege.

Pardons are common at the end of a president’s tenure, and are occasionally politically fraught affairs, as convicted felons look to leverage connections inside the White House to secure clemency.

Last week, President Donald Trump announced that he had pardoned his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, even as a federal judge was weighing a Justice Department request to dismiss the case.

Attorney General William Barr says the US Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election, disputing President Donald Trump’s persistent, baseless claims.

Barr said US attorneys and FBI agents had been working to follow up specific complaints and information they had received, but ‘‘to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election’’.

Barr has been one of the president’s most ardent allies. Before the election, he had repeatedly raised the notion that mail-in voting could be especially vulnerable to fraud during the coronavirus pandemic.

Barr also revealed that he had appointed US Attorney John Durham as a special counsel, giving the prosecutor the authority to continue to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe after Joe Biden takes office, and making it difficult to fire him. Trump has long railed against the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign was coordinating with Russia.