Beg Your Pardon: On The Perversion of Mercy, Grace & Forgiveness in the Age of Trump
On December 3, 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned Tim Leiweke, a sports and entertainment executive. Leiweke lead the Oak View Group, a prominent developer that completed the redevelopment of the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Washington. The venue hosts celebrity musicians and is the home of the Seattle Kraken NHL team and Seattle Storm WNBA team. It is in line to host the rebirth of the Seattle Supersonics when expansion takes place in the NBA. He also lead an assortment of sports and entertainment companies like the Anshutz Entertainment Group (AEG), Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE), and was even president of the Denver Nuggets of the NBA.
The felony charge involved allegations of bid-rigging during the redevelopment of the Moody Center in Austin, Texas, a venue used for music and sports by the University of Texas. This is the sort of high-level prosecution that does not get approved "willy-nilly." Federal prosecutors do not like to lose prominent cases. They never aim for such senior executives without a strong belief that a conviction will be obtained. President Trump's own Department of Justice, lead by his hand-picked Attoney General Pam Bondi, filed the case five months ago. But thanks to the lobbying of former GOP Congressmen and Fox News personality Trey Gowdy, Leiweke has received a pardon during an ongoing criminal investigation and trial. Reports indicate that the pardon may have simply traded hands between holes on a golf course. An even graver insult to our nation.
This is just the latest example of a torrent of pardons emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where a who's who of white collar criminals and fraudsters, along with all the J6 insurrectionists, have been sprung from prison. Trump has pardoned 1500 people. For perspective, over a four-year period President Joseph, R. Biden, Jr. pardoned eighty people. The most egregious pardon may be Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese Bitcoin fraudster, money launderer, whose platform was implicated in significant criminal activity. Zhao lobbied hard for a pardon and has coordinated with Eric and Donald Trump, Jr., the President's sons, to further Trump's own crypto business empire. With Trump's net worth soaring (at least on paper) due to his crypto businesses, this particular pardon arguably could be the largest ever individual bribe paid to an American official in the history of the county.
The interesting thing about Trump is that he is sometimes "right for the wrong reason" or "wrong about something he could have been right about." The United States is an overincarcerated society. When it comes to severe criminal punishment we consistently find ourselves among peer nations like China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, and an assortment of hermit dictatorships in far-flung locations. Not the sort of vibrant democracies we profess to associate ourselves with. Thus, the idea of expanding the pardon power is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. Many every day people could use a fresh start in life, freed from the burdens of a sentence far too punitive for the crimes for which they were convicted. Many criminal justice reformers have noted that Presidents could use this power to drastically reorient our society away from draconian punishments for non-violent offenses, particularly involving drug use.
Nevertheless, Trump has a knack for finding the softest parts of the Constitution between the black letters and exploiting them for his own personal gain and aggrandizement. For decades, the pardon power was used sparingly, if only because Presidents were wary of the negative attention and reputational harm of letting criminals out of consequences. Trump as usual has navigated around such scrutiny simply by being a prolifically scandalous leader, committing a litany of outrages at all times of the day. This has allowed appalling pardons to skate through news cycles either unchallenged or with a single news story.
Whether Trump is granting pardons as part of a direct monetary bribery scheme, as a quid pro quo to gain other favors from powerful people seeking his grace, or simply to send an unmistakeable message that he is in charge of American law and justice, is left to the American people to decide. However, Trump's prolific, chaotic, and haphazard process for granting pardons has severely corroded the underlying purpose of the pardon power: grace, forgiveness, and the ability to correct injustice.
I.
Colleen Shogan, author of Rubenstein Center Scholarship at the White House Historical Association wrote in a piece entitled The History of the Pardon Power: Executive Unilateralism in the Constitution
Shogan explained:
The origins of the pardon power in the United States Constitution can be found in English history, known previously as the “prerogative of mercy.” It first appeared during the reign of King Ine of Wessex in the seventh century. Although abuses of the pardon power increased over time, leading to limitations on it, the pardon power persisted through the American colonial period. Alexander Hamilton introduced the concept of a pardon power at the Constitutional Convention. There was debate about whether Congress should have a role in the pardon power, with the Senate approving presidential pardons. Delegates also debated whether treason should be excluded from pardonable offenses. However, the final result was an expansive power for the president in Article II, the strongest example of constitutional executive unilateralism. The framers of the Constitution deliberately separated the judicial function of government from the pardon power, therefore obviating concern from English jurist William Blackstone that the power of judging and pardoning should not be delegated to the same person or entity. They also reasoned that pardoning subordinates for treason would subject the president to threats of impeachment and removal from office.
Impeachment, sigh. The architects of our Republic placed so much hope in this creaky and half-dead procedure that required high character, incorruptibility, and moral conviction, three attributes that are in rare supply in American politics.
Alexander Hamilton's fingerprints on this unchecked power tracks well. Hamilton, beloved of teens, Gen Z and Millenials thanks to the wonderous art created by Lin Manuel Miranda, has received a significant glow up over the past decade. Especially for a founder little known beforehand because he never became president and whose smug aristocratic smirk graces the often overlooked ten-dollar bill. Miranda framed one biographical detail properly. He's usually paired as a trivia clue with his chief antagonist Aaron Burr in the notorious duel of honor. Of course, he's rightly famous as one of the three pseudonymous scribes of the Federalist Papers, authoring some of the most important essays on presidential power and the executive authority.
Though portrayed as a plucky underdog in the musical, Hamilton was an ardent believer in an almost monarchal vision of presidential power. The interbranch competition we see as a hallmark of our democracy, "Checks and Balances", annoyed him. Presidents, installed into office as Suddenly Great Men, tend to have a deep affection for this first Secretary of the Treasury, because he whispers beguilingly into their ear "Do what must be done." Thus, he clashed with other founding era leaders who viewed his vision of the executive at odds with the restive public spirit of the Revolution. Yet Hamilton prevailed on his vision of the pardon power.
We are saddled with a man of the bleakest, lowest character wielding this unchecked power with absolutely no concern for public perception. Having a Senate unwilling to convict him of his many impeachable offenses, and armed to the teeth by Supreme Court that has given him a forcefield immunity ruling, Trump is ostentatiously using the pardon power to erode the very idea of the rule of law.
II.
The pardon power requires an admission of guilt and acceptance of culpability. One cannot be pardoned and also be actively fighting one's conviction. But even this seeming ironclad requirement to accept wrongdoing and accountability seems to have been shoveled to the side in this corrupt era. Criminals who are pardoned simply preen and moonwalk around in public saying they did nothing wrong. The pardon is not functioning as forgiveness and mercy, or to rectify grotesque injustice, but rather as exoneration.
This philosophical recalibration is evident in the manner in which President Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt discusses individual pardons. This week, Leavitt was asked about an appalling pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez. By way of backstory, the Central American leader was convicted of trafficking four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States. In perhaps the most significant prosecution of this sort since Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was tried and convicted decades ago, Hernandez was sentenced to forty-five years in prison. President Trump pardoned him and then promptly told them media he knew nothing about it. An intolerable state of affairs. Hernandez had addressed himself directly to Trump for a pardon obsequiously appealing to his graciousness in dealing with the "stolen election" of 2020. Just the sort of fluffing Trump demands of his supplicants. Leavitt was left with little to work with and so gestured vaguely about the prosecution being a Biden-era overcharging.
As reported in Politico:
Leavitt continued to characterize Hernández’s charges as politicized under a “weaponized” Justice Department, claiming his conviction was based on testimony from “many admitted criminals” who hoped their testimony could reduce their sentences and that his lawyer was given insufficient time to prepare for trial. “He shared that his conviction was lawfare by the leftist party who ‘struck a deal’ with the Biden-Harris administration,” she said. “Hernández has highlighted there was virtually no independent evidence presented.”
Imagine that. A prolific drug kingpin convicted by the testimony of other criminals in the organization! It's hard not to see Trump feeling a soulful connection with Hernandez over the heavy crown of the mob boss. In fact, recall that in his first administration he referred to informant witnesses testifying in criminal cases on behalf of the United States as "rats." There is something more nefarious at play as noted by Faith Wardell in the Politico article. Specifically, Trump was coupling his pardon with transparent interference in Honduran elections.
Wardwell explains:
"In a stunning move Friday, Trump announced he’d grant a “Full and Complete Pardon” to the two-term president — saying he was treated “very harshly and unfairly” in his conviction while also praising Nasry Asfura, a candidate for the Honduran presidency and the leader of the right-wing National Party, who’s earned Trump’s backing in the race. “This cannot be allowed to happen, especially now, after Tito Asfura wins the Election, when Honduras will be on its way to Great Political and Financial Success,” he wrote on Truth Social.
This use of the pardon power directly undermines our own policy objectives to curb illegal immigration while providing more legal means to enter our country. One of the reasons Central and South American immigration has risen is due to the instability of their own governments. Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Venezuela are beset by violent and unstable societies in which civilians are menaced by drug gangs. Hernandez being a prolific drug trafficker demonstrates that these criminal gangs reached into the highest levels of their societies. For Trump to pardon this man and send him on his way is deeply destabilizing to the region, and only exacerbates immigration policy problems.
Such baroque and convoluted scheming is an abuse of the pardon power simply inconceivable to the founding delegates. They could envision giving pardons to individual family loyalists of low repute. They might even understand the pardons to various lifelong, sordid business associates with murky connections, albeit with a scowling side-eye. But our founders never would have conceived of pardons being used for international criminals who were endangering the United States, as part of corrupt machinations with foreign political candidates and parties. They could hardly imagine George Washington conspiring with Barbary pirates to seize commercial trade routes for himself personally while working to install regional leaders, boldly daring the Congress to impeach and remove him from office.
More importantly, it is not really relevant what this founding generation would think today. We are the custodians of our Constitutional Republic. It is for us to safeguard the rule of law. Until Trump, no modern president used the pardon power in such a transparently personal, transactional and objectively sleazy manner. Some will scoff. What of Joseph Biden pardoning his son and others in his administration? Even those pardon's by his predecessor trace back directly to Trump himself. For this sour man, bent of ruthless vengeance, promised to prosecute a bevy of his opponents. In fact, he has set the Department of Justice this week on those who pursued him. Most recently, refiling charges against Leticia James, the unflappable New York Attorney General who secured a felony conviction of him in New York state court. A bedeviling conviction because he cannot pardon himself for it. Even to this day, the Mad King occupant of our Whie House regularly calls for prosecutions of former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, and even allude to his own FBI directors James Comey and Christopher Wray.
As with so much in this dark time, a fundamental assumption underpinning our Republic is that the electorate would never select a venal criminal to occupy this highest office. A regrettable failure of cynical imagination. It was, until Donald Trump, twenty-thousand leagues beneath the dignity of the presidency to act in such a boorish, careless and chaotic manner with the public's trust. Pardons went through a specific office, reviewed by independent attorneys kept at arm's length from the President. The purpose was to convey that the exercise of the pardon power had to be carried out in such a way as to reinforce the public's perception that we are nation of laws, not men. Former "Pardon Attorney" Liz Oyer has become one of the most vocal and outspoken critics of the current President's irrational and excessive behavior.
III.
Finally, let us consider the undermining of the very concept of mercy, grace and forgiveness. There are many people sitting in prison cells across our country who have rectified their lives while incarcerated. They deserve a chance to live outside in free society with the rest of us. The pardon power is a powerful direct tool to help nudge our mean-spirited, prison-loving society toward the grace we are supposed to show to those who err. The pardon power can also rectify the injustices of systemic racism, where certain crimes were visited with mandatory cruelty when they persistently ensnared minorities. Or where crimes were disproportionately enforced against minorities. The pardon power can also reflect historical reconsideration, where a past punishment is seen in a new light as an act of brave political courage and personal sacrifice.
As with all things Trump has gotten his hands on, he has left a nation shell shocked about the pardons he issues almost daily. Our most immediate worry is that several of the people he pardons simply commit other heinous crimes upon their release. This concern implicates J6 insurrectionists convicted and sentenced to prison who have gone on to commit vile crimes upon their release. But the more philosophical idea of undermining the very idea of right and wrong is a corrosive acid that has dissolved part of the fabric of our rule of law. We can see, with our own eyes, that those willing to give Trump some thing he wants can be freed from prison for grotesque crimes on a mere whim and with no documented process. "What sort of justice system is this?" we are left to mournfully ponder.
The pardon scandal has left many people in the public demanding that the Article II power be drastically reconfigured, even though amending the Constitution to curb the pardon power feels remote and impossible. It's even more embittering that some founders understood the problems we are experiencing well. Their distrust was warranted. Their suggestions that treason not be pardonable, or that the Senate have to approve pardons, would have served us well in this nightmare second term. Trump's potential personal profit for selling pardons would have been stopped in its tracks, mired in procedural tar in the Senate.
Of all his injustices upon our society, it is possible that Trump's abuse of the pardon power is the worst thing he has done. This is because he has taken a tool of grace and mercy and made it appear to be broken and senseless. He has taken a public that should be oriented toward a greater willingness to pardon and made them skeptical, seething that pardons are just another corrupt abuse creating a two-tiered justice system. This broken trust in our justice system will echo through future administrations. Should we find out that he actually sold pardons, we will be left only with outrage as a consolation, as he surely will pardon himself, his family and anyone else involved. All the while, this disreputable, dishonorable man will hide behind the Supreme Court's ruling immunizing him from any scrutiny for exercising black letter Article II powers.
While such treachery may be pardonable, it is unforgivable.