President Trump has issued pardons for 77 people, including his former attorney Rudy Giuliani and former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who backed his effort to subvert the 2020 election.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Trump has issued a sweeping pardon of his allies related to the 2020 presidential election and the effort to falsely claim he won. U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin posted the pardons on X, clearing people for, quote, “conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud.” Rudy Giuliani and former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows are among those named in the proclamation. And joining us now to talk about this is NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks. Hi, Miles.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hey, Leila.
FADEL: OK. So this pardon applies to at least 77 people. Are there any other notable names here?
PARKS: Yes. So many of the names will be familiar, both to people who were paying attention after the 2020 election and to anyone who monitored the many investigations into the January 6 riot. Attorneys Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and John Eastman are all named. And then the rest of the names are names you may not have heard of. These are people who met oftentimes in secret after the election in 2020, to make up alternate slates of electors that could have potentially impacted the correct certification of the presidential election in 2020. Importantly, though, none of these people have actually been charged with federal crimes. Many have been charged in state court, but a federal pardon has no impact on those cases.
FADEL: OK. So where do the cases stand against the people who have been charged in their states?
PARKS: So many of them have run into roadblocks.
FADEL: OK.
PARKS: In Michigan, a month or two ago, a judge recently dismissed charges against 15 people there who signed false electoral certificates. The case in Georgia was severely undermined after a court ruled that the DA’s office should be removed from that case. And then the biggest case of all here, that did get tossed, was in federal court. That was the federal election interference charges that were dropped against President Trump after he was reelected. So all of this adds up to a landscape where very few people have faced criminal repercussions for the plot to overturn the 2020 election, and these pardons just kind of guarantee that.
FADEL: OK. It’s been five years, and President Trump still seems very focused on the 2020 election and claiming it was fraudulent. Where does this go from here?
PARKS: I mean, looking forward, Trump and people in his circle are using their claims about election fraud as justification for all sorts of federal election policies that frankly would have been unheard of under many other Republican presidents, considering how ardently that party has fought for states to have control over their elections, not the federal government. We’ve seen the Justice Department make unprecedented requests for election data, as well as to investigate local voting machines, and the president has tried to enact change with executive orders, with an executive order in March that mostly at this point, has been blocked by the courts. But I should note that today’s pardon does seem to indicate that the president is still taking cues from the, you know, fraud-focused, the election denial wing of the Republican Party.
FADEL: Right.
PARKS: For instance, Cleta Mitchell, who’s a Republican attorney who’s built a sort of grassroots network of election integrity groups across the country, she’d been posting on X a bunch recently, explicitly asking for these pardons. And this morning, she called the news an answer to those prayers.
FADEL: Has the White House said anything about these pardons yet?
PARKS: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has confirmed the pardons in a statement to NPR. She said, “these great Americans were persecuted and put through hell by the Biden administration for challenging an election, which is the cornerstone of democracy,” end quote. I should note that no one in the administration in the five years since this election has provided proof that the election was actually tainted by widespread fraud, and numerous audits and investigations have confirmed the results of the 2020 election.
FADEL: Right, of course. NPR’s Miles Parks. Thank you, Miles.
PARKS: Thanks, Leila.
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