President Donald Trump unleashed another wave of pardons for his allies on Wednesday night, including his son-in-law’s father Charles Kushner and his former campaign president Paul Manafort, who lied to investigators investigating interference in the Russian elections .
The goofy president – who for the past few days seemed determined to cause as much shock and confusion as he could before leaving office on January 20 – also forgave Roger Stone, whose sentence he commuted in July, and the wife of ex-bastard O deputy Duncan Hunter, whom he forgave on Tuesday.
The sheer amount of pardons over Christmas week – which included former Blackwater guards accused of war crimes, two border agents accused of covering up a shootout and some more traditional candidates – seemed designed to reward loyal devotees in a moment when Trump lost Republican support for his intended to subvert the election and is busy hitting the head in Congress.
“By forgiving Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Charles Kushner, President Trump has made it clear that he believes the purpose of forgiveness is to rescue wealthy white men attached to him,” executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Noah Bookbinder said in one declaration. “Trump has transformed an instrument of mercy and justice into just another way of being corrupt.”
Trump’s actions were also denounced by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who was sentenced to prison for fraud despite his cooperation with Mueller’s investigation of a possible collusion of Trump’s campaign with Russia to interfere in the 2016 elections.
United States Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), a Trump critic, was succinct in his assessment: “This is rotten to the core”.
Trump’s forgiveness of Manafort was widely expected in light of his repeated praise for the convicted fraudster and complaints that he had been a victim of Russia’s “farce”.
According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, for more than a year Trump has been sporadically bringing private conversations as it was “cruel” and unfair for Manafort to be kept in solitary confinement. In his mini-speeches on the subject, Trump suggested he verged on the “torture” of a political prisoner – although he never made the inhumanity of solitary confinement a political priority or even tweeted about less connected prisoners who support it.
In a statement on Wednesday, the White House detailed the idea that Manafort had been punished because of his association with the president.
“As a result of the prosecutor’s blatant exaggeration, Mr. Manafort has endured years of unfair treatment and is one of the most prominent victims of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American history,” he said.
Manafort reacted to his forgiveness for writing his first tweet in years to praise Trump. “Sir. President, my family and I humbly thank you for the presidential forgiveness you have granted me. Words cannot fully convey how grateful we are,” he wrote, telling Trump that he “really did ‘Make America Great Again'” and ” accomplished more in 4 years than any of its modern predecessors ”.
Some commentators were quick to note that forgiveness can have a downside.
“Be careful what you wish for – people who receive pardons no longer enjoy the privilege of the 5th Amendment. Which means that they can be forced to testify about anything. Get your popcorn … ”, tweeted deputy David Cicilline (D-RI).
In this regard, Andrew Weissman, who was one of Robert Mueller’s special advisers, tweeted: “It’s easy to defeat Trump in his game: put Stone and Manafort on the grand jury after 1/20/21 to find out what they hid from the government about Trump – and if they lie, they can be prosecuted for perjury and obstruction. “
Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance, who obtained a charge against Manafort on state charges last year and is appealing for his resignation under the double penalty rule, said that forgiveness for his federal crimes makes the case for New York even more so. crucial.
“This action underscores the urgent need to hold Mr. Manafort responsible for his crimes against the People of New York, as alleged in our indictment, and we will continue to seek our appeals,” said Vance in a statement.
As with Manafort, the White House tried to justify Stone’s forgiveness by painting the dirty and unrepentant cheater as a helpless victim “treated very unfairly” by Mueller’s investigators.
Trump’s confidant was convicted of lying to Congress, tampering with witnesses and obstructing the House’s investigation into meddling in the Russian elections. The president commuted his 40-month sentence over the summer.
“Forgiving him will help to correct the injustices he faced at the hands of the Mueller investigation,” said the White House.
Charles Kushner, father of senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, was released from prison in 2006 after serving two years for tax evasion and falsifying witnesses. He was accused of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law so that he could film the meeting and then send it to his sister to scare her from testifying before a grand jury.
His prosecution was overseen by then-United States Attorney General Chris Christie, who has obviously become one of Trump’s biggest supporters. Christie, who believes that Jared Kushner orchestrated his expulsion from the Trump transition team as revenge for the prosecution, has long insisted that his father deserved what he received.
“It is one of the most disgusting and disgusting crimes I have ever prosecuted,” said Christie, who could not be reached for comment on the pardon, said in the past.
On December 22, Trump pardoned a number of others, including former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to Mueller’s team during the investigation in Russia; former US Reps. Chris Collins (insider) and Steve Stockman (campaign fraud); and four Blackwater mercenaries found guilty of the massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in 2014. Just before Thanksgiving, the president granted clemency to Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser who pleaded guilty – twice – for lying to the FBI.
The pardons were applauded at Trumpworld. “Paul paid a price for his crimes,” Ed Brookover, a former senior adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign who worked with Manafort, told The Daily Beast. “Unfortunately, Paul was also unjustly accused and condemned by the media for many other things during Mueller’s unjustified investigation.”
Manafort, 71, was convicted of a myriad of financial crimes linked to his lobbying for pro-Russian political entities in Ukraine and pleaded guilty in a case that involved obstructing Mueller’s investigation. He was sentenced to seven and a half years, but in May he was allowed to serve the rest of his sentence in home confinement due to fears of COVID-19 in prison.
Over the course of several years, which partly coincided with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Manafort made millions by advising Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. In 2016, Ukrainian investigators found handwritten ledgers showing more than $ 12 million in undisclosed cash payments to Yanukovych’s party’s Manafort for work related to influencing the elections in favor of Yanukovych.
The books were first released by a Ukrainian investigative journalist and then by the country’s National Anti-Corruption Office. Records obtained by the Associated Press in 2017 showed that at least $ 1.2 million in payments for 2007 and 2009 listed in one of these books – known as a “ledger” – were received by your consulting firm.
Despite these documents, Manafort continued to publicly question the authenticity of the ledger after its exposure. There were some in the media – particularly right-wing columnist John Solomon, who is known to have propagated unverified theories about Ukraine – who claimed that the ledger had been falsified and that George Soros was somehow behind the original leak. Solomon’s stories in Ukraine were closely aligned with the narratives promoted by Rudy Giuliani at the time. Others followed Solomon’s example. Republican lawyer Joe DiGenova, who once represented Solomon, accused Soros in Fox Business interviews of controlling the State Department and the FBI in an attempt to influence politics in Kiev.
In his 2019 sentence on the obstruction charges, which added 43 months to the four years charged with financial fraud, Manafort told Judge Amy Berman Jackson: “I’m sorry for what I did. Let me be very clear, I accept responsibility for the acts that made me be here today. “
Jackson was not moved.
“It is difficult to overstate the number of lies, the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved,” she told him, adding: “Saying ‘I’m sorry for being caught’ is not an inspirational plea for clemency.”
Trump is considering further forgiveness on his way out the door and said he discussed the forgiveness not only of his family members to avoid possible future lawsuits, but also himself. While practically all U.S. presidents of both parties granted pardons and sentence commutations before leaving office, Trump has been incredibly brazen in using his powers of forgiveness to help friends and repay associates he considers personally loyal.
As his departure from the White House approaches, Trump is reportedly responding to numerous requests from hopeful forgiveness seekers. Those seeking to be exempt from blame for past crimes include reportedly Joe Exotic, the incarcerated Tiger King Trump star and former campaign advisor Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators during the investigation in Russia.
Former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who was indicted by a grand jury in New York for financial fraud, is also considered one of the candidates for a possible pardon. Trump would also have considered giving preventive pardons to some members of his own family facing legal scrutiny, as well as his lawyer Rudy Giuliani.