President pardons another 29 people, including ex-aides
Manafort, Stone, Kushner’s father make list; Trump leaves for holiday
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday granted pardons or sentence commutations to another 29 people, including his son-in-law’s father and two former advisers who were convicted as part of the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
With his time in office nearing its end, Trump pardoned former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted in 2018 of committing financial fraud and conspiring to obstruct the investigation of his crimes. Trump also upgraded the clemency he had earlier provided to longtime friend Roger Stone — convicted of seeking to impede a congressional investigation into Russian interference — from a commutation to a pardon.
In addition, the president pardoned real estate developer Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-inlaw, Jared Kushner. Charles Kushner pleaded guilty in 2004 to having made false statements to the Federal Election Commission, to witness tampering, and to tax evasion stemming from $6 million in political contributions and gifts mischaracterized as business expenses.
The list of Wednesday’s pardons and commutations was disclosed by the White House after Trump left for his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., for the Christmas holiday.
The moves took place just a day after Trump granted clemency to 20 people, including two others who were convicted of crimes as part of the investigation into Russian interference.
The president also pardoned three former Republican members of Congress and several military contractors involved in the killing of unarmed civilians during the Iraq War.
With Wednesday’s pardon of Manafort, Trump has now intervened to aid five people charged in the Russia investigation, which was eventually taken over by then-special counsel Robert Mueller.
The White House announcement of the pardons made no secret that Trump was taking aim at that investigation.
The announcement said Manafort’s convictions were “premised on the Russian collusion hoax” and that the pardon for Stone would “help to right the injustices he faced at the hands of the Mueller investigation.”
Manafort in a series of tweets Wednesday thanked Trump and lavished praise on the outgoing president, declaring that history would show he had accomplished more than any of his predecessors.
In a statement, Stone thanked Trump and alleged that he had been subjected to a “Soviet-style show trial on politically-motivated charges.”
In November, Trump pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his dealings with a Russian diplomat, though he later sought to take it back. In July, he commuted the sentence for Stone, who had been sentenced to 40 months in prison. And on Tuesday, he pardoned George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to his 2016 campaign who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Mueller’s team.
The president has long complained that the investigation was a “witch hunt” and a “hoax,” and pressured Attorney General William Barr to prosecute some of the officials Trump blamed for it, including President-elect Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama and former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired.
Barr, whose last day in office was Wednesday, has echoed Trump’s criticism of the investigation and ordered an inquiry into its origins, but to the president’s frustration he did not prosecute anyone for it before last month’s election.
Barr had also moved to reduce the sentencing recommendation for Stone and to overturn the guilty pleas entered by Flynn. But Barr supported the prosecution of Stone.
Trump’s moves sparked blowback, mostly from Democrats, who accused him of wielding his executive authority to shield himself from possible criminal investigation.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., called for eliminating the presidential pardon power.
“Once one party allows the pardon power to become a tool of criminal enterprise, its danger to democracy outweighs its utility as an instrument of justice,” Murphy tweeted.
“It’s time to remove the pardon power from the Constitution.”
Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said of Trump’s clemency moves, “This is rotten to the core.”
The practical effect of Trump’s latest moves was particularly significant for Manafort, who had been facing a 7½-year federal prison sentence, though he was released to home confinement in May, about two years in, over fears of the coronavirus.
Manafort was convicted in federal court in 2018 of stashing the money he made as a lobbyist for Ukrainian oligarchs overseas to avoid taxes and then committing bank fraud to keep up a lavish lifestyle when his patrons lost power. He then pleaded guilty to related charges in and pledged to cooperate with the special counsel, but a judge concluded that he lied to investigators, notably about his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime aide assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence.
During the 2016 campaign, Manafort gave Kilimnik internal Trump campaign polling data; Mueller’s investigators said they were never able to determine how Kilimnik used the information.
Charles Kushner, who was sentenced to two years in prison, already has served his time. Among the allegations leveled by prosecutors were that he paid for an unnamed individual’s private school tuition out of company accounts and declared the payments as charitable contributions on his tax returns, according to court documents.
Upon his release, Charles Kushner resumed his real estate development work, and his New Jersey firm manages more than 20,000 apartments in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Tennessee.
Jared Kushner, the husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, has long argued that the prosecution against his father, led by then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, was unjust, despite his father’s guilty pleas.
According to court documents, while Charles Kushner was under investigation over his campaign contributions, he grew angry when he learned that other family members were cooperating with the inquiry. He paid a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law in a New Jersey motel room, where hidden cameras had been set, and later had the tape mailed to his sister as a warning, according to the documents.
Charles Kushner told The New York Times in 2018 that he would “prefer not to have a pardon” because of the publicity it would generate.
PERSONAL TIES
Also on the clemency list released Wednesday was Margaret Hunter, the estranged wife of former Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. Both had pleaded guilty to charges of misusing campaign funds for personal expenses.
Duncan Hunter was pardoned by Trump on Tuesday as part of a first pre-Christmas wave of grants of clemency to 20 convicts, more than half of whom did not meet the Justice Department guidelines for consideration of pardons or commutations. They included a former Blackwater guard sentenced to life in prison for his role in the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.
Of the 65 pardons and commutations that Trump had granted before Wednesday, 60 had gone to petitioners who had a personal tie to Trump or who helped his political aims, according to a tabulation by Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith.
“The pardons from this President are what you would expect to get if you gave the pardon power to a mob boss,” tweeted Andrew Weissmann, a Mueller team member who helped prosecute Manafort.
Not all of the pardon recipients had previous ties to Trump. One was Topeka Sam, whose case was promoted by Alice Johnson, a criminal-justice advocate whom Trump pardoned and who appeared in a Super Bowl ad for him and at the Republican National Convention.
“Ms. Sam’s life is a story of redemption,” the White House said in its release, praising her for helping other women in need.
Others granted clemency included a former county commissioner in Florida convicted of taking gifts from people doing business with the county; a community leader in Kentucky convicted of federal drug offenses; and a former Justice Department official who was convicted for his role in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Information for this article was contributed by Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, Colby Itkowitz, Jonathan O’Connell and Rachel Weiner of The Washington Post; by Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times; and by Eric Tucker, Jill Colvin and Michael Balsamo of The Associated Press.