Donald Trump is considering issuing 250 presidential pardons to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America, according to a new report.
The president may make the announcement on June 14, his own birthday, or on July 4, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Trump has already faced criticism for issuing an historic number of pardons since returning to office for his second term, despite vowing to end what he described as the “politicization” of the Justice Department during his campaign.
Many of these were handed out to individuals convicted of crimes related to the January 6 insurrection. On his first day back in office last year Trump has issued pardons to over 1,500 of those involved in the storming of the Capitol.
The WSJ reports that plans for the 250 pardons this summer are still in the preliminary stages and that even some within the Trump administration have raised concerns that issuing too high a number of pardons could affect Republicans in the midterm elections.
A White House official told The Independent that the no actions have been taken and no final decisions made, adding that all clemency-related actions are up to the president.
Aside from the haul of pardons issued to “J6ers”, the vast majority of Trump’s pardons thus far have been related to public fraud and white-collar crimes.
Last year the president let at least 11 former members of Congress off the hook for their own alleged crimes and preemptively pardoned nearly 80 people involved in his efforts to overturn election results, The Independent reported previously.
Trump is now “normalizing public corruption” and downplaying the crimes of convicted fraudsters who stripped millions of dollars from victims, according to former DOJ Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer.
The president is now “liberally pardoning corrupt public officials who are charged with offenses that involve abusing their political offices to enrich themselves,” Oyer told PBS in December.
Such liberal use of constitutional power has led to a record number of pardon requests, with more than 16,000 formal requests being submitted for pardons last year, according to DOJ data analyzed by The WSJ.
Requests included those from high-profile criminals including Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted founder of crypto exchange FTX, and Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump has said publicly he has no intention of granting the pardon for Bankman-Fried, though has not definitively ruled out the possibility of one for Maxwell – who assisted the DOJ with its investigations into Epstein last year.
The president was asked about the suggestion of clemency for Maxwell after the Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal. “I have a lot of people who’ve asked me for pardons,” he told reporters.
