WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s pardons of white-collar criminals who support his presidency and donate to his campaigns stoked plenty of outrage from Democrats and former law enforcement officials last week.
Now, even some Republicans are signaling their discomfort with his decisions to grant clemency ― and the way he’s going about it.
“I think that when the president pardons someone, they need to carefully explain why injustice was done,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told HuffPost. “And I think pardons should be rare, and President Trump likes pardons much more than I do.”
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In recent weeks, Trump has pardoned a former Virginia sheriff who was convicted of trying to sell deputy badges, a Las Vegas politician who stole money intended for a memorial dedicated to a fallen police officer, a tax cheat whose mother raised millions of dollars for Republican political campaigns, and a pair of reality television stars who were convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion.
