There are many people in United States prisons deserving of clemency, and this week President Donald Trump used his powers to help some of them.
One was Tynice Nicole Hall, who at age 23 was sentenced to 35 years in a Texas prison because she let her drug-dealing boyfriend use her apartment to stash his wares. Mr. Trump commuted her sentence, setting her free after 14 blemish-free years behind bars.
Another was Crystal Munoz, who has served 12 years of an 18-year sentence in Texas for conspiring to sell marijuana. Her crime was to draw a crude map for friends, who then used it to avoid a police checkpoint. The President commuted her sentence, too.
Freeing two of the hundreds of thousands of Americans serving draconian sentences for non-violent, drug-related offences, most of whom come from the low end of the income scale, is a compassionate act.
But whatever merit there was in Mr. Trump’s salvo of pardons and commutations this week was sullied by the fact that most of the other people who benefited were well connected, wealthy Americans who abused positions of public trust, and were convicted of fraud, lying and corruption.
Chief among them was Rod Blagojevich, a former Illinois governor convicted in 2011 of 18 corruption charges, including trying to sell or trade a seat in the state Senate for money and favours. He was impeached in the state legislature by a 114-1 vote; a court later sentenced him to 14 years.
But the remainder of his sentence has been commuted, thanks to Mr. Trump. Legislators in Illinois, both Republicans and Democrats, are furious about his early release. They hadn’t counted on the President’s tendency to come to the rescue of people he happens to know and like.
Mr. Blagojevich was a competitor on Mr. Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice, in 2010 while he was awaiting trial. He earned the future President’s admiration by turning his impeachment and multiple indictments into a source of celebrity, and using the attention to proclaim his innocence on late-night talk shows.
“You’ve got a hell of a lot of guts,” Mr. Trump told him on an episode of The Apprentice.
Mr. Blagojevich insisted he had done nothing wrong up to the moment he was convicted. When he came out of prison Wednesday, he picked up where he left off, thanking Mr. Trump for giving back the freedom that was "stolen” from him, and calling his conviction an “injustice.”
The former governor may have been a Democrat, but he’s a Trump man to the bone: no remorse, utterly corrupt and devoid of shame.
The President blessed other powerful white-collar criminals with a full pardon. They included: Michael Milken, the “junk-bond king” of the 1980s who served two years in prison after pleading guilty to securities fraud; Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who pleaded guilty to tax fraud and to lying to White House officials; and Edward DeBartolo Jr., a National Football League team owner who pleaded guilty to concealing an act of extortion.
There are often valid reasons for the state to pardon convicted criminals, or commute their sentences. But while hundreds of thousands of non-violent criminals without connections to the powerful are being denied that opportunity, and 14,000 have petitioned for clemency, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics, Mr. Trump helped out a rogue’s gallery of wealthy people who have his ear, donated to his campaigns, or spoke well of him in public.
This pairs in a troubling way with Mr. Trump’s attacks on the Department of Justice, which he falsely accuses of bias against him, and by his demands to reduce the sentences of his political allies – most notably Roger Stone, who was convicted of obstructing the Mueller investigation into collusion between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 election team.
This week, the emboldened Mr. Trump demanded that all charges stemming from the Mueller investigation be thrown out. He further claimed that he is “the chief law enforcement officer of the country,” which is wrong, and also quite mad.
Mr. Trump’s messages are clear: that the U.S. justice system is out of line when it targets powerful politicians and those, like Mr. Stone, who serve them. And that clemency will be made available to the President’s criminal friends.
These are dangerous ideas. They are also unAmerican.