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President Donald Trump has been taking what feels like an Oprah Winfrey–style approach with his pardon power: All you Jan. 6 rioters, you get a pardon! And all you folks who helped subvert the 2020 election for me, you get a pardon! And what the hell, that crypto billionaire charged with a felony, you also get a pardon! All in all, Trump has issued about 1,600 pardons since the start of his second term. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has even told his staff he will issue preemptive pardons for them in 2028 before he’s slated to exit the White House.

No former U.S. president has exercised his pardon power quite like Trump has. In fact, he’s even outdone his full first-term numbers, when Trump issued fewer than 250 pardons and commutations. The Wall Street Journal estimated that to date Trump has issued six times that number over the first 15 months of his second term. And he apparently has no intention of slowing down, with administration officials telling WSJ the president has repeatedly “raised the specter of pardons with White House aides and other administration officials, particularly when staff have suggested they could face prosecution or congressional investigations over decisions.” It’s become a running joke within the White House, as Trump has promised he will pardon anyone who came within 200 feet of the Oval Office.

Trump is wielding the pardon power with full impunity, aided by Supreme Court rulings that have affirmed the presidential pardon authority as “unlimited,” and left little to no room for congressional oversight. The only exceptions are in cases of impeachment and for state criminal offenses. This has essentially inspired Trump to wield pardons as a tool of political influence, as he pardons people facing serious federal criminal charges and who may have otherwise faced prison time. Now, these folks have a new lease on life, all thanks to the president, who expects unflinching loyalty in return.

To understand what risks Trump’s mass pardons create and what Congress can do to slow, if not outright stop, Trump, I spoke with Frank Bowman. He’s a law professor at the University of Missouri, a former federal prosecutor, and a pardon expert. He’s the author of a forthcoming book Pardons: Discretionary Clemency and the Rule of Law in Britain and America 1066–2026, all about the history of U.S. presidential pardons and the power they hold.

Here’s our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Shirin Ali: What’s been your impression of Trump’s approach to the presidential pardon?

Frank Bowman: One has to see Trump’s use of the pardon power in the context of his

general attempt to undermine the rule of law and establish a sort of autocratic form of presidential governance. His uses of pardon power fit in with, for example, his progressive destruction of the Department of Justice as a meaningful law enforcement agency, and his transformation of it into an agency whose dual purposes are essentially to protect his friends or people who share his business interests, and to punish his enemies. We’ve seen that in a whole variety of contexts, essentially as Trump disabled large swaths of the DOJ’s enforcement capacity, particularly in the areas of white collar crime and political corruption, to the benefit of people who are political adherents of Mr. Trump, or are, in the case of cryptocurrency offenders, people who are actually in the same business as the Trump family. Or in the case of finance, people who are directly contributing to the Trump family wealth.

You have one side of Trump’s second-term behavior, where he’s essentially hamstrung the Department of Justice at the front end of the criminal prosecution and investigation process, and then the pardon power, as he’s used it so far, is twinned with that. Trump has used the pardon power to excuse people who perhaps have already been prosecuted, or are in the course of being prosecuted for offenses. These are people that, again, are his political supporters, who share his economic interests, or for some reason, catch his attention.

You have to see Trump’s misuses of the pardon power in context of this overall transformation of the federal criminal justice process into essentially a personalized area of presidential control. The other instances of this, of course, began on his first day in office, when he issued pardons to all the Jan. 6 rioters and insurrectionists. Some months later, he preemptively pardoned 77 people who haven’t yet been charged, but certainly could be, for their roles in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. These are people who were in some cases literally his co-conspirators in former special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference criminal case.

It’s in this vein that you have to see his most recent comments in the White House that he’s going to pardon everybody within 200 feet of the Oval Office. In other words, what he’s saying is, If you folks commit crimes on my behalf, don’t worry about any criminal consequences. I’ll simply pardon you all at the end. He’s creating a whole permission structure for illegality, as long as........

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