Donald Trump has reportedly said he will issue pardons en masse to his closest advisers at the end of his second presidency, promising them in casual conversations over the last year.
“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office],” the president reportedly said in a recent meeting, garnering laughs from the room, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing an anonymous source.
The publication reported that another source had said Trump used the line in an earlier conversation, but with a smaller radius: he said he would pardon anyone who came within 10ft of the presidential office. Other sources claim Trump has floated hosting a news conference at the end of his term where he will announce mass pardons.
In response to the report, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said: “The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke. However, the president’s pardon power is absolute.”
Since starting his second presidency, Trump has granted clemency to more than 1,800 people. On his first day in office, Trump gave unconditional pardons to 1,500 people who had participated in the 6 January 2021 US Capitol attack carried out by his supporters, including those charged or convicted with assaulting or resisting law enforcement during the riot.
A Trump-appointed federal prosecutor recently had to ask a judge to deny a dismissal request from a man who is accused of planting two pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the Capitol attack.
The man said his charges should be cleared because of Trump’s widespread pardons of those involved in the attack – and that his charges are “inextricably and demonstrably tethered” to the riots. The judge overseeing the case has not responded to the man’s request.
Many of Trump’s acts of clemency so far have been framed as rebukes to the justice system after Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020 to end his first presidency. The Biden administration sought to prosecute Trump for various alleged offenses before he returned to power, including for illicitly seeking to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.
Trump in October pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who had been sentenced to four months in prison after he pleaded guilty for not maintaining an anti-money laundering program.
Earlier in the year, Binance accepted a $2bn transaction from the Emirati investment fund through World Liberty Financial, the crypto enterprise run by Trump’s family. The transaction helped legitimize the family’s digital currency.
In a statement at the time, the White House said that Zhao had been “prosecuted by the Biden administration in their war on cryptocurrency”.
Trump also granted clemency to the former US representative George Santos, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft. The president commuted Santos’s seven-year prison sentence, allowing him to be released after three months behind bars.
“He lied like hell,” Trump said at the time. “But he was 100% for Trump.”