What do a Texas Democrat, Honduran president and recently charged CEO have in common? They got their cases in front of Trump

By Adam Cancryn, Alayna Treene, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump is taking an increasingly personal role in the government’s clemency process, wielding pardons with historic frequency to aid allies and advance his own political grievances.

The pardon actions have come so abruptly in certain cases that they surprised even some of those close to the president — such as a trio of recent clemency grants to a Democratic congressman, an executive charged by Trump’s own Justice Department and a former Honduran president convicted of drug-trafficking crimes.

Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people this year, including hundreds who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as a range of disgraced politicians, white-collar fraudsters and other well-connected figures.

The pace of those clemency grants to date has far exceeded any prior administration and has upended a system within the Justice Department that presidents relied on for decades to carefully vet applicants and deliver periodic pardon recommendations to the White House.

Instead, Trump and his top aides have established a far more ad hoc pipeline that frequently privileges those who share the president’s political beliefs or social circle — and who can make a direct case that they too were the target of a “weaponized” Biden administration, according to interviews with half a dozen people familiar with the pardon process.

“This is the power that he loves,” said one of the people. “He does it. He decides, and it’s done.”

Among the pardons that Trump personally ordered were his three most recent moves, freeing former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández from a 45-year prison sentence and pardoning Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar and businessman Tim Leiweke. The decisions came after close allies made appeals to Trump on their respective behalf, people familiar with the matter said, arguing in each case that they’d been overzealously pursued by Biden-era prosecutors.

“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was president of the country,” the president said of Hernández, whose case had been spotlighted by longtime Trump ally Roger Stone and GOP former Rep. Matt Gaetz. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.”

Since returning to office, Trump’s expansive use of his pardon powers has provided him with yet another powerful avenue to exert influence over a justice system that he’s dramatically reshaped just a year after being convicted himself of dozens of felonies.

Trump’s actions also underscore the degree to which he has sought in his second term to take full advantage of the levers of government to achieve his political and personal goals, with little regard for precedent.

During his first administration, Trump granted just 238 pardons and commutations, most of which came amid his frantic final days in office. But this time around, the White House has worked to make clemencies a key part of its agenda.

The pardon gatekeepers

The effort has been managed by a small clutch of senior aides and advisers, including White House special counsel David Warrington, chief of staff Susie Wiles and US Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, the people familiar said. Most cases are initially considered by Warrington, in coordination with Martin and the Justice Department, who then take their handpicked candidates to Wiles for review.

Warrington and Wiles subsequently bring Trump their pardon picks so he can make a final decision, a senior White House official said.

Trump’s senior aides have sought to issue those pardons at regular intervals, according to two of the people familiar with the matter, including around holidays like Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And in the vast majority of cases, there is a single commonality: The people being pardoned were prosecuted during the Biden administration, granting them clemency just months after their convictions, despite long-held DOJ standards that are supposed to limit pardons to those who finished serving their sentences more than five years ago.

Trump’s Inauguration Day clemency for the January 6 Capitol rioters instantly undid years of work carried out by federal prosecutors. Of the 89 other pardons or commutations that Trump has signed since that first act, more than two-thirds covered people sentenced during former President Joe Biden’s term.

That approach represents a sharp departure from the traditional approach employed by prior administrations, which typically included subjecting a pardon candidate to extensive vetting and an FBI background investigation, as well as consulting if necessary with prosecutors on their case.

“It’s really quite shocking to see how quickly and seemingly thoughtlessly this administration is unraveling some of those major prosecutions,” said Liz Oyer, who served as pardon attorney during the Biden administration before being fired earlier this year.

The White House defended Trump’s decision-making as in line with his authority to grant clemency to whomever he deems deserving, while also criticizing Biden’s decisions late in his term to pardon his son, Hunter, and to commute the sentences of most inmates on federal death row, giving them life in prison without parole instead.

“President Trump has exercised his constitutional authority to issue pardons and commutations for a variety of individuals,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement, adding that Biden’s pardons are “the only pardons anyone should be critical of.”

‘There are access points’

The stepped-up cadence and focus on recent convictions has driven a boomlet of lobbying for pardons, whereby wealthy people hire Trump-world figures in hopes of getting their case to the front of the line.

The White House has tried to discourage the practice, including by pausing its pardons earlier this spring amid reports some representatives were charging clients millions of dollars to lobby the administration. The White House official warned that “anyone spending money to lobby for a pardon is wasting their funds.”

Still, the business has continued to surge, two people familiar with the process said.

Few, if any, pardon candidates are being selected solely through the pardon attorney office’s official application process, the people said. Instead, Trump-connected lobbyists and lawyers have deployed a playbook that includes getting a request directly to Martin, Warrington or other senior Trump aides, marshaling the president’s allies — such as retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz — to serve as character references, and making the case their client was treated just as unfairly as Trump believes he was.

“There are access points,” said Robert Ray, who was part of Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment trial. “It’s like getting admitted to Harvard. … Someone in the admissions offices has got to pay attention and be willing enough to sort through all these applications of similarly qualified people.”

Ray is now lobbying for a pardon on behalf of New York strip-club owner and newspaper publisher Selim Zherka, who pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud charges in 2015, and who now maintains he was targeted at least in part because he was an outspoken member of the tea party movement.

“The argument is one we hope is appealing to this particular president about weaponizing the government,” Ray said. “I think he’d appreciate the point that we’re trying to make.”

Trump makes his own pardon rules

Still, even as the White House has tried to impose its own structure on the pardon process, Trump on several occasions has circumvented it to issue pardons on a whim. Those decisions usually come at the request of one of his friends, or after taking an interest in a case he came across on social media or television, the senior White House official said.

“Trump also has full clemency power, and people will go to him asking for him to consider a pardon or he’ll read something and decide to move forward,” said the official, who added that Wiles, Warrington and DOJ officials are then charged with carrying out the pardon.

That was the case last week with Hernández, Cuellar and Leiweke, the people familiar said. Trump’s pardon for the former Honduran president came after Stone sent him a letter that Hernández wrote seeking clemency.

“I read the entire trial transcript and it was clear to me that he got railroaded,” Stone told CNN, adding that he believed the government relied on misrepresentations and faulty testimony. “Forty-five years is a death sentence.”

Trump soon came to the same conclusion, casting Hernández as a victim of political persecution despite offering no new evidence to counter the extensive case that federal prosecutors built against a man described during his trial as a central player in the global cocaine trade.

The decision to free Hernández — who once said he was “going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses,” according to witness testimony — came the same week the administration was defending a so-called double-tap strike that killed survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean by arguing they were trying to deliver drugs to the US and therefore posed an imminent threat.

As for Cuellar, Trump had kept tabs on the Democratic lawmaker’s bribery case and had previously told friends that he believed the congressman was being treated too harshly by the Biden administration in part because of his politics, the senior official said. Cuellar has described himself as a “conservative Democrat” and was sharply critical of Biden’s immigration policies.

And while the Texas Democrat has told associates he did not seek a pardon or know he would receive one, a letter Cuellar’s daughters wrote to Trump seeking his intervention also played a role in the president’s decision, the senior official said.

Trump’s pardon of Leiweke, meanwhile, came after former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy personally advocated for his case, one of the people familiar with the matter said. The move was remarkable even by Trump’s standards; Leiweke had been charged just months ago with rigging the bidding process for a sports arena, meaning the president effectively overruled his own Justice Department.

In the aftermath, some in Trump’s orbit have privately questioned the wisdom of those spur-of-the-moment pardons. They worry in particular that Hernández’s release could undercut the administration’s broader case for its escalating offensive against Venezuela on the basis that it’s trafficking drugs into the US, and that erasing Cuellar’s legal issues will complicate Republicans’ efforts to flip his seat next year and keep control of the House.

“I don’t know that midterm strategy was considered,” one Trump ally said in the wake of the clemency actions.

Indeed, Cuellar quickly filed for reelection as a Democrat, quashing speculation that he might switch parties.

And just four days after pardoning the Texas lawmaker and declaring that Cuellar’s “nightmare is finally over,” Trump appeared to have some regrets.

“Such a lack of LOYALTY,” Trump vented in a Truth Social post on Sunday. “Next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.