Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has repeatedly used the power of the presidential pardon to erase federal charges and convictions against thousands of his supporters. For example, Trump issued a blanket pardon for the thousands of people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Now he has pardoned the people who allegedly falsified documents and otherwise conspired to have Trump declare victory in states he didn’t win in the 2020 election. The move once more seeks to declare that his blatantly illegal efforts to hoodwink, cajole and bully election officials and Congress into falsely declaring him the winner were, in fact, perfectly fine.
Trump has been moving to rewrite history, in effect declaring that there was nothing shady at all about his plotting
After losing to Joe Biden, Trump’s allies put into motion a scheme that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack. Republican electors in key states sent an “alternate slate” of Electoral College votes to Congress, with the expectation that Vice President Mike Pence would accept them in the face of the supposed rampant voter fraud that Trump claimed had occurred. The plan was based on an entirely unhinged reading of election law and fell apart when Pence wouldn’t play his assigned role despite the threat of the mob.
Since then, many of the players in that farcical drama have faced criminal charges for violating various states’ election laws in the process. Others have been disbarred or otherwise ostracized. But Trump has been moving to rewrite history, in effect declaring that there was nothing shady at all about his plotting. The undated proclamation he signed to that effect is sweeping in its scope, applying to “all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting activities, participation in or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of presidential electors … as well for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 presidential election.”
What follows is a depressingly long list of people, which includes (but is not limited to) a who’s who of 2020 election deniers. Among those listed: ringleader/head clown Rudy Giuliani; former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; and John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, architects of the twisted legal justification for the plot. Also named are many of the state-level GOP officials who signed off on the fraudulent certificates declaring Trump the winner of their electoral college votes. Those false documents were then sent to Congress and the National Archives.
News of the wide-ranging pardon didn’t come from the White House but was posted on X by Ed Martin, a MAGA acolyte who managed to fail up into his current role as the Justice Department pardon attorney. Much of the purported memo justifying the pardon rehashes Trump’s preposterous conspiracy theories. (A link to the document was posted on X by Cleta Mitchell, one of the recipients of the pardon, who attributed its contents to Martin; MSNBC has not been able to independently verify its authorship.)
In one sense, most of this is academic. The pardon Martin announced, while vast in scope, is still limited to federal crimes and misdemeanors. While some listed were unnamed co-conspirators in the now dismissed federal case against Trump, the criminal allegations filed against Giuliani, Meadows, and others named in the pardon were all under state law, outside of the purview of the White House’s reach. Trump could no more pardon them for those alleged crimes than he could pardon a ham sandwich. In normal times, these pardons would be rightly regarded as mere propaganda that assuages Trump’s ego.
More troublingly, the pardon acts as an invitation for those who took part in the attempted autogolpe to be returned into the fold.
But Trump appears to be in pursuit of two worrisome goals. The memo attributed to Martin argues that the states have no power to police the Electoral College and its members. Because the electors perform an essentially federal role, the memo reads, “states’ prosecution of this lawful and well -established conduct, for the first time in American history, does great and unacceptable violence to our Nation’s federalist structure.” Thus, the first goal appears to undercut the remaining state cases that are still active and give those defendants an argument for any conviction to be overturned on appeal.
More troublingly, the pardon acts as an invitation for those who took part in the attempted autogolpe to be returned into the fold. Those who have been disbarred, like Giuliani and former Justice Department lawyer Jeffery Clark, have already said that this decision should restore their ability to practice law. And the pardon is a greenlight for those people who actively worked to subvert the 2020 election but have not been charged to replicate their campaign against democracy in the future.
This would be distressing even if a number of election deniers hadn’t already been installed in positions within the Trump administration. Knowing that the president will issue them a pardon for any tampering with future elections should not give us overwhelming confidence in future elections — and that is the true power of Trump’s conspiracy peddling. If he pardons those people who lied and attempted to manipulate election results, then he’s making it easier for them to do so again. And that makes it harder for people who believe in fair elections to trust the results.
Not being able to trust that votes are counted well and accurately serves nobody in a democracy, regardless of who’s making the accusations. In undercutting the sanctity of the vote, Trump’s cursed, self-fulfilling prophecy lurches closer to becoming a reality.
