The pardon power is the most unreviewable authority in the American constitutional order. No court can second-guess it. No statute limits it. No agency can block it. The framers, aware of its potential for abuse, placed it in a single set of hands — the president's — and trusted that political accountability, institutional norms, and an independent Justice Department would keep it from becoming an instrument of corruption. A June 2026 Reuters investigation spanning thousands of records and more than eighty interviews suggests that in Donald Trump's second term, every one of those guardrails has been stripped away.
The numbers tell the foundational story. Reuters found that 96% of Trump's second-term clemency grants have gone to recipients who failed to meet longstanding Department of Justice guidelines for clemency — guidelines that have governed the pardon process, in substantially the same form, since the mid-twentieth century. Under President Biden, fewer than 1% of clemency recipients bypassed those standards. Even in Trump's first term, when he already had a reputation for unconventional pardons, only 14% of recipients failed to meet them. The current rate — 96% — is not an incremental departure. It is the effective abolition of the formal process.
What the Guidelines Actually Require
The Justice Department's clemency guidelines are not arbitrary bureaucratic hurdles. They were developed over decades to ensure that the pardon power serves its constitutional purpose — mercy in cases where justice demands it — rather than devolving into a tool for rewarding allies or paying off political debts. They require, among other things, a five-year waiting period after conviction or release from confinement before a pardon application can be considered. They require demonstrated remorse and acceptance of responsibility. They require a record of rehabilitation and law-abiding behavior post-conviction. They require the applicant to have no pending civil litigation. And they require that the application be submitted formally to the Office of the Pardon Attorney — a career-staffed, quasi-independent unit within the Justice Department that conducts background investigations, solicits the views of the original prosecutors, and prepares a recommendation for the White House.
The guidelines are not law. The president can ignore them. But they exist for a reason: the pardon process is the last backstop against the selective, politically motivated manipulation of the federal criminal justice system. When a president pardons a political ally, a major donor, or a friend of a friend who connected through the right influencer, he is not correcting an injustice — he is using the criminal justice apparatus as a reward-and-punishment mechanism for loyalty. That is, by any conventional definition, corruption of the process.
The Firing of Liz Oyer
The institutional dismantling of the process has a precise start date. On March 7, 2025, the Trump administration fired Liz Oyer, the career Department of Justice attorney who served as Pardon Attorney — the head of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, or OPA. In her place, the White House installed Ed Martin, a political loyalist whose stated philosophy for clemency can be summarized in the phrase he adopted as something of a motto: "No MAGA left behind."
Oyer did not go quietly. Testifying before the Senate in April 2025, she accused the Justice Department of "ongoing corruption" and stated that "the leadership of the Department of Justice appears to value political loyalty above the fair and responsible administration of justice." These are not words that career federal attorneys use lightly. The Office of the Pardon Attorney exists to insulate the clemency process from exactly the kind of political pressure Oyer described. Its replacement with a loyalist whose public standard for clemency is partisan identity rather than legal merit was the structural signal that the process had changed fundamentally.
By February 2026, even Martin was reportedly considering leaving the department — not because the corruption had stopped, but because of internal conflicts with Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, over jurisdiction and authority within the clemency process. The fight was not about whether the guidelines should be followed. It was about which political actors would control the pipeline that had replaced them.
The Influencer Network
Reuters identified 290 individual advocates — the investigation calls them "influencers" — who publicly or privately helped secure clemency for 197 recipients. Their efforts collectively represent 624 distinct acts of influence. Among those 290, 73 individuals helped secure more than one pardon or commutation. Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney now in private practice in Utah, has been involved in at least twelve pardons or commutations. Roger Stone, the veteran political consultant and long-serving Trump confidant — himself a recipient of a Trump commutation in the first term — has had a documented hand in at least five.
The mechanics of how this works were illustrated, with unusual specificity, by the pardon of Trevor Milton, the electric-vehicle entrepreneur convicted of defrauding investors of more than $660 million. In a phone call with Milton just before his pardon in March 2025 — details of which Reuters obtained and reviewed — Trump told Milton directly that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, had put in a good word for him. "You had a lot of support," Trump told Milton. "Bobby Kennedy. You have to call Bobby and thank him."
The phrase "you have to call Bobby and thank him" is more than a social pleasantry. It is a description of how the system works: identify the right person in Trump's inner circle, convince them to carry your case to the president, and the president's sense of personal loyalty to that advocate becomes the operative criterion for mercy. Milton's fraud conviction — half a billion dollars in investor losses — was not corrected on its legal merits. It was addressed through a network of relationships. The five-year waiting period did not apply. The demonstrated remorse requirement did not apply. The OPA background investigation did not drive the outcome. A phone call did.
What Access Costs
Reuters found that six people with direct knowledge of recent clemency transactions said that intermediaries with proven access to Trump's inner circle can charge as much as $2 million for their services. The agency was unable to establish precisely how much each identified advocate charged in any specific case, and some — including Roger Stone — have publicly stated that they charged nothing. But the range itself, $0 to $2 million, is the measure of a market. When access to a constitutional power is priced, the power has been commercialized. The pardon is no longer mercy. It is a product.
This dynamic creates precisely the kind of two-tiered justice that the American constitutional structure was designed to prevent. Defendants with resources — or connections to people with resources — can purchase a pathway to executive mercy that simply does not exist for defendants without them. The 20,000-plus clemency applications currently pending at the Office of the Pardon Attorney, according to a tally compiled by the former Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer, will be processed — to whatever extent they are processed at all — through a system that does not pretend to evaluate them on their legal merits. They will be evaluated on who the applicant knows, who those people know, and what those relationships cost.
The Democratic Response and the White House's Denial
The Reuters investigation, published on June 11, 2026, has prompted a formal response from Congressional Democrats. A June 15 follow-up Reuters report documented Democratic pressure on the Trump administration over what legislators characterized as "pay-to-play" pardons — a phrase that the White House rejected. "The constitutional authority to issue pardons and commutations rests solely with the president," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in response to Reuters' inquiries. "The White House has a rigorous pardon review process which includes the White House counsel, the Department of Justice, and ultimately the president."
The DOJ issued a parallel denial, stating that it "plays a key role in assisting the president with exercising his constitutional authority" and that there has been "no departure from this long-standing process."
These statements are remarkable for what they do not dispute. Neither the White House nor the DOJ challenged Reuters' core finding: that 96% of second-term clemency grants bypassed the longstanding guidelines. Neither disputed the existence of the influencer network. Neither denied the role of RFK Jr. in the Milton pardon or of Roger Stone in at least five others. The denials are categorical assertions that nothing improper occurred — without engaging with the documented specifics of how the process actually works. That is not a rebuttal. It is a non-answer dressed as one.
The Constitutional Dimension
It is important to be precise about the legal situation here, because the White House's core claim — that the president's pardon power is unreviewable — is correct. It is. Courts have consistently held that the pardon power is plenary and unreviewable by the judiciary. Congress cannot restrict it by statute. The guidelines the DOJ has historically applied are not laws; they are administrative norms. When a president ignores them, no court will intervene.
But the fact that something is constitutional does not mean it is not corrupt. The pardon power was designed for mercy. It was not designed to be a commercial product dispensed through an influence-brokerage network to those who can pay. The difference between a pardon issued to correct an injustice and a pardon issued because the recipient's representatives paid the right influencer $2 million is not a legal distinction — it is a moral and institutional one. What Reuters has documented is the systematic conversion of a power meant for justice into a mechanism for rewarding loyalty and enriching access brokers. That is not what the framers intended. That it is technically constitutional does not make it something other than what it is.
The concern extends beyond individual cases. A clemency system in which outcomes are determined by access rather than merit is a system that communicates, to every person in federal custody, that justice is not the operative principle of their situation. It tells defendants that the question is not whether they deserve mercy but whether they know the right people. It tells prosecutors that their work can be undone not by courts but by influencers. And it tells the public that the law applies differently depending on how much money you have and who you know. These are not new concerns about the American justice system. But the Reuters investigation has documented, with unusual specificity and scale, a White House that has made them the operational reality of presidential clemency.
What Accountability Looks Like From Here
Congressional Democrats have begun pressing for answers, but their leverage is limited. The Senate Judiciary Committee can investigate; it cannot subpoena the president's pardon deliberations, which are covered by executive privilege. Individual influencers who are registered lobbyists must disclose their activities in federal filings; those who operate informally — as Reuters found many do — have no disclosure obligation at all. The Justice Department is not going to investigate itself.
What remains is the historical record — and the press. The Reuters investigation is among the most significant pieces of government accountability reporting of the current term. The Ethics Reporter will continue to document individual cases as they emerge. The public record now includes a detailed accounting of how the pardon process works, who participates in it, and what it costs. That record is not going away.
Former Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer, who was fired for refusing to participate in a process she found corrupt, has continued to speak. Her testimony before the Senate stands as the clearest direct account from inside the machinery: a career official who watched the process she administered be dismantled, who called it what it was, and who is now on the outside watching the results accumulate. If accountability ever comes for this chapter of presidential clemency, her words will be in the record.
This article is based on a June 2026 Reuters investigation by multiple reporters, published June 11, 2026, and a follow-up Reuters report published June 15, 2026; Wikipedia's documented record of second-term Trump clemency grants, updated June 14, 2026; Senate testimony by former Pardon Attorney Elizabeth G. Oyer, April 2025; and reporting from Politico, HuffPost, and Prism News on the same investigation. The Ethics Reporter relies on published and on-record sources. Readers with direct knowledge of specific clemency transactions involving unlawful conduct are encouraged to submit tips at theethicsreporter.com/tip.
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