BYE-BYE, PARDONER
Don gives nod to 143, hours before he leaves office
Before he lost his presidential powers, Donald Trump pardoned Steve Bannon, his disgraced former chief strategist, as part of an eleventh-hour clemency spree early Wednesday that also covered a Republican Party megadonor, a couple of controversial rappers and many others.
Trump held off on announcing the whopping 143 clemency actions until 12:51 a.m. Wednesday — just over 11 hours before President Biden was sworn in — keeping the incessant drama of his administration intact until the bitter end.
In a literal last-minute surprise, Trump announced less than an hour before Biden’s inauguration that he would also pardon Albert Pirro, the tax cheat ex-husband of Jeanine Pirro, one of his staunchest defenders on Fox News.
Notably absent from the lengthy clemency list was anyone named Trump, despite rumors that the ex-president was for months considering preemptively pardoning family members and even himself amid concern that they could face a variety of legal jeopardy once he’s out of office.
With no one named Trump in the mix, Bannon stood out as the most eyebrow-raising clemency recipient.
A major force behind Trump’s 2016 election, Bannon was charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan last summer with defrauding thousands of Trump supporters through an alleged self-enrichment scheme that he advertised as a donation campaign for the ex-president’s signature Mexican border wall proposal.
Trump, who derisively nicknamed Bannon “Sloppy Steve” after firing him from the White House in August 2017, didn’t even dispute the charges against his former righthand man in a statement explaining the pardon.
“Prosecutors pursued Mr. Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project,” the statement said. “Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen.”
Remarkably, Bannon’s three co-defendants — who stand accused of the same crimes — were not pardoned by Trump.
Bannon, who has denied the charges against him, could not be reached for comment.
Beyond Bannon, a high-profile person on the clemency list was Elliott Broidy, a deep-pocketed former Republican National Committee finance chairman, who pleaded guilty last year to illegally lobbying the Trump administration to drop a major Justice Department fraud case against a wealthy Malaysian businessman.
Trump also didn’t explain his pardon of Broidy, only saying the GOP donor “is well known for his numerous philanthropic efforts.”
Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, a couple of Trump-supporting rappers charged with gun crimes, also got clemency, as did former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a Democrat, who’s in prison for a laundry list of corruption crimes.
Paul Erickson, a GOP operative in South Dakota, got a pardon as well. Erickson was convicted of fraud in 2019 after his relationship with a convicted Russian spy caught the attention of federal investigators probing Moscow’s Trump-boosting interference in the 2016 election. Trump, who has long railed against investigations into the Kremlin’s attack on the 2016 election, said he only pardoned Erickson because his conviction was based on “the Russian collusion hoax.”
Many of Trump’s other pardons and sentence commutations covered relatively unknown individuals in prison for drug and fraud crimes.
Trump’s interest in giving preemptive pardons to himself and his three adult children apparently fizzled after the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, with advisers warning him that attempts at self-clemency would amount to an admission that he instigated the siege with his inflammatory rhetoric and baseless attempts to overturn Biden’s election.
Also not on the clemency list was Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney.
Giuliani, who has not been charged with any crimes but faces scrutiny from the feds over his business dealings in Ukraine, said before the late-night announcement that he had asked Trump not to pardon him. “I told him I don’t want or need one,” Giuliani told the Daily News in a text message.
The Bannon pardon may rub some in Trump’s family the wrong way.
After getting booted from the White House, the right-wing politico lambasted Donald Trump, Jr., as “treasonous” for meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign. He also called Ivanka Trump “dumb as a brick.” In response, Trump said at the time that his one-time top adviser had “lost his mind.”