White House attorneys are evaluating whether to issue mass pardons to junior staffers, as Trump allies press the administration to protect lower-ranked officials from prosecution and other legal challenges, according to two sources familiar with the conversations.
While President Donald Trump has publicly discussed issuing pardons for top aides and issued pardons for billionaires and major donors, questions have mounted about the potential legal jeopardy facing thousands of employees who have implemented the White House’s agenda.
A pardon for all junior administration personnel is viewed as unlikely, one source said, but the president could issue blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war or trade. Trump has previously said he would be interested in pardoning some administration officials, but the discussions happening now would apply to a far greater number of White House staff than has been previously reported.
Several conservative organizations influential with the administration — including the Heritage Foundation and American Moment — have pressed White House counsel to either prepare pardons or put in place funding for the legal fees necessary to defend junior staffers from criminal and congressional probes or potential lawsuits, according to the two sources familiar with the conversations plus an additional source familiar with the conversations. Mike Davis, a prominent Trump supporter and president of the Article III Project, an advocacy group that fights legal cases for the right, also said he plans to press the White House for action.
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These efforts have only intensified, the sources told The Washington Sun, after Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) said earlier this month that congressional investigations into Trump officials should make young Republicans think twice before joining the administration in its final two years.
“After listening to Elissa Slotkin threatening to go after young people who joined the Trump administration, President Trump should issue very broad preemptive pardons for anyone who worked for him or in his orbit,” Davis told The Sun on Friday.
The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
The president has recently shown at least some willingness to penalize potential wrongdoing in his administration. In a rare example of the Trump administration investigating itself, the Justice Department is looking into allegations of contract misconduct against longtime Trump aide Corey Lewandowski.
“All I know is, I want my people to be honest. And if they’re not going to be honest, they have to be prosecuted,” Trump told reporters after the Lewandowski news broke.
The White House and The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nick Solheim, chief executive officer of American Moment, also declined to comment on private conversations. Still, he said: “The president has been very clear he knows the personal, professional and financial risks of Democratic lawfare against people who are affiliated with him and serve him. Political appointees operate on behalf of the president, and I don’t have any assumptions other than that the left will do everything in its power to hunt down conservatives who are implementing the president’s agenda.”
Robert Weissman, co-president of watchdog group Public Citizen, told The Sun that an impartial Justice Department would look at a range of Trump administration actions that could have broken the law, including unlawful transfers of money between federal agencies, improper use of taxpayer resources for campaigning, contracting arrangements benefiting friends and family of administration officials, and a range of behavior toward immigrants.
Administration officials, Weissman said, “should be worried about being held accountable for violations of civil and criminal law not because future prosecutors may be vindictive but because their jobs would require them to investigate and, if necessary, prosecute the blatant illegalities of the administration.”
Trump’s Justice Department has also brought legal cases against several of the president’s perceived political foes, including former FBI Director James Comey and two former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about their role in the bureau’s Hunter Biden investigations.
The planning for potential pardons reflects the accelerating breakdown of long-standing norms over one of the broadest powers granted to the president by the U.S. Constitution. Joe Biden issued more acts of clemency than any prior president and also issued “preemptive pardons” to prominent allies, including several members of his own family, top medical adviser Anthony Fauci and retired Gen. Mark Milley. Trump has taken the pardon power to a new level in his second term, granting clemency to roughly 1,700 people as of June, according to Reuters.
The Justice Department has traditionally housed the formal pardon process, and department officials have vetted candidates before presenting qualified ones to the president. The Trump administration has scrambled that process, though presidents going back decades have also been accused of using pardons to reward friends and allies.
There is likely little a Democratic Congress could do to overturn broad pardons issued by the president. Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution states that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” The pardon power does not extend to state or local crimes.
Trump has publicly suggested an interest in preemptive pardons for some officials, telling Newsmax earlier this month: “Because these people are lunatics on the, on the left — I don’t want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing.”
Trump has suggested he could pardon himself and has long maintained it is within his right to pardon his officials, citing Biden’s prior actions. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Trump has also suggested, to “laughs,” pardoning “everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval.” Karoline Leavitt, who was then White House press secretary, said at the time: “The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke.”
“Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody,” Trump told Time magazine in September. “But you mean I’m not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe’s allowed to give them?”
Liz Oyer, the pardon attorney under Biden, said the former president’s pardons set a “really bad precedent” but were limited in scope. Biden did not consult the DOJ’s pardon office before issuing more than a dozen preemptive pardons at the end of his term.
“There have never before been blanket preemptive pardons of everyone in the administration,” Oyer told The Sun. “Preemptive pardons of everyone in the administration, or even of a significant number of administration officials, would be incredibly damaging because they would effectively place the executive branch outside the reach of the law, which would upset the constitutional order of our country in a very fundamental way.”
Widespread pardons for political appointees would be “a new development in American history,” said Mark Osler, a law professor and clemency expert at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.
“It’s a despoilment of what is supposed to be a tool for mercy and national reconciliation being used as a battlefield tool in political wars,” Osler said. “Certainly, the Biden administration did this and blazed the trail, and now it’s potentially being followed in much greater numbers by Trump. I don’t think anyone would conceive that the framers would hope it would be used this way.”
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