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- [00:02]
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- [00:28]
Joanna Coles
for Donald Trump to pardon himself and his entire cabinet if necessary?
- [00:35]
Liz Oyer
I think it is not only possible, but likely that Donald Trump will very broadly grant pardons to members of his administration who may have committed crimes in the course of their official duties. And that certainly could include Pete Hegseth, it could include Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, Stephen Miller, who's his close advisor, and it also, frankly could include large numbers of people like the ICE agents who are carrying out his immigration agenda.
- [01:05]
Joanna Coles
I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. And amid the crazy, the flooding the zone technique of the Donald Trump administration, number two, it's very easy to lose sight of some of the more sinister and ominous things going on. No one has been better at tracking the growth of the pardons economy than the lawyer Liz Oyer, who was the former pardons attorney for Joe Biden. And she talks about how she wished that he hadn't actually pardoned Hunter Biden because it's given Donald Trump all sorts of ammunition against his critics. But literally what's going on right now is that people are just paying money to get out of jail. All sorts of people, scamsters, you name it, drug lords. It's kind of incredible. And it's sort of going under the radar because there's just so much else. And how much can you get your head around? Anyway, we're going to start this episode with a clip from Savannah Chrisley, who is the daughter of Todd and Julie Chrisley, who were TV reality people who were totally scamming people. They went down for wire fraud and all sorts of corruption and they got a seven year federal sentence. They ended up only serving 18 months. And then miraculously, Donald Trump decided to confer mercy upon them and they were freed from jail. Here is their daugh defending their release on the podcast behind the Table last week and claiming that no money changed hands.
- [02:41]
Savannah Chrisley
I think, you know what, the president has full authority to pardon individuals. Biden pardoned his son on his way out. So for me, I, I am grateful for the pardons. It gave us our lives back about seven, eight years before we ever would have. Right so my parents got to come home. They got to take my go to my with my little brother to move into his first apartment in college. They got to do so many things they would have missed out on. I understand that there's backlash from it, but there's backlash, I believe, because the media loves to report false things. There was a podcast that came out that said I paid for, I paid a million dollars for a pardon that is 110% false.
- [03:29]
Joanna Coles
Liz Oyer, no one has been better at tracking this pardon economy. You heard there an example of Savannah Chrisley saying that she didn't pay a million dollars. We have no idea what she did pay. We don't know whether or not she paid someone as a middleman, one of the increasing lobbyists who are trying to get people out of jail and doing business with the Trump administration. You were the former pardon's attorney for the Biden administration. You've been on the podcast before. And for people who haven't seen you before or aren't tracking your meticulous coverage of the pardons economy on Instagram, what should people be concerned about now? And can you explain this burgeoning pardons economy?
- [04:14]
Liz Oyer
So Donald Trump has turned the pardon power into a completely transactional instrument. He has monetized it and made it a political tool in ways that we have now never seen before in this country. The pardon power gets a bad rap sometimes because people think of these examples throughout history of pardons that have been granted based on political considerations. A notable one is Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich, who was a political donor who was actually a fugitive at the time. So, but those actually are a small minority of the pardons that have been granted throughout history. And for the most part, what has anchored the pardon power has been the idea of mercy granting second chances to people who have really earned and deserved them. And there's a long standing set of guidelines that the Justice Department has in place that talk about who should be considered for a pardon. And they're really very rigorous and they're really based on merit. You really have to earn it to be recommended by the Justice Department for a pardon. Politics don't come into it. Wealth doesn't come into it. It's really all about have you demonstrated rehabilitation? Have you demonstrated that you have moved on with your life since your conviction in a pos direction. But that has all gone out the window under Donald Trump.
- [05:33]
Joanna Coles
So can you explain to us, you mention and you've basically brought into the conversation this sense of the Trump's pardon economy, but it's not people paying him literally. Right. It's not people coming up with a check for a million dollars and saying, I need you to get my parents out of jail. Yeah.
- [05:51]
Liz Oyer
It's very transactional, and sometimes the transaction involves money changing hands. So sometimes it's other considerations. In the case of Savannah Chrisley, she got on the campaign trail for Donald Trump and became a very vocal, outspoken supporter of Donald Trump. She spoke at the Republican National Convention on his behalf and she ingratiated herself to him by doing political favors for him that helped him to get elected. And that was how it appears that that's how she was able to persuade him to pardon her parents. Her parents are people who did not go through the ordinary process of applying for pardon, didn't demonstrate that they were deserving of a pardon. They're people who did not pay back the debts that they owed to the victims of their crimes. They committed multimillion dollar fraud scheme, and they owe, I believe, over $10 million in restitution to the victims of their crimes. But that was wiped out by Donald Trump's pardon. And that is an example of the transactional nature of the pardon power under Donald Trump. So maybe she didn't literally pay them any money, but she gave Trump something of value and was rewarded with the pardon of her parents.
- [06:59]
Joanna Coles
So not everybody is going to go out there on the campaign trail for him. But what are the other ways of leveraging connections around Donald Trump to try and get someone out of prison? And just as an aside, I was, you know, mind blown when she says, oh, now my parents are out and they can take my little brother to his first apartment. And you're thinking, what about the people who are owed millions of dollars and get no restitution? Let's come onto restitution in a moment. But can you explain this sort of layer of people who are taking money to hustle the president to get people out of jail? Yeah.
- [07:37]
Liz Oyer
You know, on that point about, you know, what my family being reunited, she talks about her brother. There are so many people who are legitimately deserving of that opportunity. There are so many families that have been broken apart by incarceration. And in many cases, there are people who've been incarcerated for decades and would do anything for the chance to be reunited with their families there. Those people have applied through this ordinary, rigorous process. They don't have political connections to leverage. So to hear Savannah Chrisley say that about her family when there are so many deserving families who are waiting is really just. It's tone deaf to say the least. And it really illustrates this two tier system of justice that Donald Trump has created where people like the Chrisleys get one standard of treatment and then people who, you know, have no political connections are treated differently.
- [08:29]
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- [09:00]
Liz Oyer
But there are lots of ways to leverage this access with Donald Trump. And that's just one example. We've seen much more direct sort of pay for play instances of pardons. There's a guy named Paul Walsack, for example, who was a health care executive. He skimmed millions of dollars off the tops of the paychecks of his employees, doctors and nurses who worked for his companies. And he used the money to buy a yacht and for luxury shopping sprees. And he was sentenced before a judge who rejected his plea to not go to prison. And the judge actually said, I am sentencing you to 18 months in prison because I am sending a message that wealth is not a get out of jail free card in this country. You must be treated like anyone else would be treated. And he sentenced him to prison for this large scale fraud. Very shortly after, Walsack's mother, who was a major Republican donor who lived in Palm beach near Mar a Lago, paid $1 million to have dinner with the resident at Mar a Lago. And within days after she attended that dinner, Donald Trump granted her son a full pardon before he served even a day of his prison sentence. So that's very clearly sort of a transactional quid pro quo.
- [10:15]
Joanna Coles
Incredible. I mean, can you talk also about CZ, the founder of Binance, who was fined, I think $8 billion by the Biden Justice Department for money laundering. He was sentenced to four months in jail, of course, very conveniently for him, he ends up having an arrangement with the Trump family crypto fund and he miraculously bounces out of jail.
- [10:42]
Liz Oyer
Yeah. So CZ is a Chinese businessman who's now a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, and he founded the company Binance, which was a major cryptocurrency trading platform. He was prosecuted because his platform was being used. He was allowing it to be used to finance international criminal or Organizations and terrorist organizations, organizations like Al Qaeda, and he was allowing it to send money to Iran. So very dangerous activity that the US Government determined what determined was harmful to US national security interests. He was prosecuted and he and his company agreed to pay massive fines. He started campaigning for a pardon while he was in prison, researching how to get a pardon. And then he made a calculated appeal to Donald Trump that involved brokering a transaction whereby $2 billion would be invested in Donald Trump's family cryptocurrency business. He facilitated that infusion of billions of dollars of money into the Trump's crypto business just as it was getting off the ground, which was sort of a crucial moment for the success of that business. And Donald Trump's family directly benefited from that investment, his sons who run the business as well as himself.
- [12:03]
Joanna Coles
The.
- [12:03]
Liz Oyer
And as a result of that investment, it appears he got a full pardon, despite the fact that US Government officials determined that he engaged in conduct that endangered national security of this country. And that pardon allows him to go right back to the business that he was conducting previously. So from Trump's perspective, it's a win win. And it's another example of this sort of transactional pay for play nature that the pardon power has taken on under Donald Trump.
- [12:31]
Joanna Coles
I mean, it's just breathtaking. So, Liz, talk to us about the pardon czar as she's known, Elise Marie Johnson, because she herself was in jail for 20 years. Yeah.
- [12:43]
Liz Oyer
Alice Marie Johnson is a woman who was sentenced to life in prison for a drug related offense. And she served over 20 years of her sentence. And she's somebody who really did demonstrate this strong rehabilitation while she was incarcerated. And Donald Trump granted her a part harden during his first term in office. And she's somebody who was deserving of that opportunity of relief. She had benefited from having high profile advocates like Kim Kardashian on her case, certainly, and Donald Trump responds to that type of thing. But in her case, she's not somebody who was undeserving. She's somebody who really, I believe, did deserve that opportunity. And she has made it her mission to help others to get clemency. And Donald Trump put her in this position of pardon czar. I believe that she went into this job with the hopes of benefiting and helping people like herself. But she has been really marginalized by Donald Trump. He prefers this very loose, almost impulsive way of granting pardons to people in whom he sees something of himself. So she, to date, has not appeared to play a driving role in, in setting the agenda for clemency Donald Trump has continued to grant clemency to whomever he feels like it, almost even on a whim, and sometimes seemingly contrary to the advice that he is receiving from his close circle of advisors, including his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who seems to have become aware that Donald Trump's pardons are causing a lot of problems because some of them are just so controversial and so undeserved.
- [14:23]
Joanna Coles
We carried in the Beast a report last week that Suzy Wiles is actually trying to keep the pardons away from Donald Trump at this point. Do you know why that is?
- [14:33]
Liz Oyer
What I have read about this is that Susie Wiles and others have become really concerned that Donald Trump's pardons have been very damaging politically because he's pardoning people who are so undeserving, so controversial, so unpopular, that she has tried to create some distance between him and Alice Johnson. The pardons are to prevent him from granting more reckless pardons. I'm not sure that that really addresses the problem. It seems like Donald Trump is inclined to grant pardons almost on a whim in circumstances where you wouldn't even think it could arise. We heard a story couple months ago that the Wall Street Journal reported about how the former congressman, Trey Gowdy, played golf with the President and over a round of golf told the President about a client of his who needed a pardon, who was in some legal trouble. It turned out that this was someone who Trump's DOJ had indicted and was actively prosecuting for a major price fixing scheme, violations of the antitrust laws, someone who was actively under prosecution by Trump's own doj. But after playing golf with Trey Gowdy, Trump decided to give the guy a full pardon and there very little additional consideration that went into it. And that person, his name is Tim Lewicki, received a full pardon. And that's the sort of thing that's very hard to reign in. I don't know that Susie Wiles can insulate Donald Trump to the extent where he's not on the golf course with people who are going to be pitching him on pardons. The other aspect of that that's really interesting is we don't know what benefits these other individuals are getting, but undoubtedly they're substantial. We don't know what Trey Gowdy got in exchange for successfully pitching Trump for that pard. But we do know that there are lobbyists and lawyers who are collecting hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars from clients who are desperate to get a pardon. Sometimes the clients are hiring people who really do have the access and can make it happen, like Trey Gowdy. Sometimes they're hiring people who are just, you know, scamming them, who don't actually have the access but are claiming they do. And a huge amount of money is circulating. It's sort of like a feeding frenzy around the idea of pardons where people in Washington D.C. lawyers and lobbyists are just enriching themselves by promising access and pardons from this president.
- [16:51]
Joanna Coles
One of the other cases that I found fascinating was also the founder of Nikola, the electronic truck company, who at one point apparently put his truck at the top of a hill. It rolled down the hill. Investors were like, oh, it's the new Tesla. It's the new Tesla. And of course, it turned out the trucks simply didn't work. They took in an enormous amount of investment and people were being defrauded right, left and center. And then he comes out of jail. Tell us what happened there because that's also an astonishing story.
- [17:23]
Liz Oyer
That is a really quite astonishing story. So this man, Trevor Milton, as you said, claimed that he was going to develop the world's first electric powered semi truck. And the whole thing was a fraud. But he had raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. And the investors included people who had put their retirement savings into this investment. So, you know, not, we're not talking about wealthy billionaires, millionaires, we're talking about people who had legitimately earned a living and had savings and invested them with this company. And the company turned out to be a total scam. And the Justice Department was asking for this man, Trevor Milton, as part of his criminal sentence. So he was convicted of defrauding his investors. They were asking for him to have to pay back the money to the investors who were defrauded. And that's what the law requires. And the Justice Department calculated that he owed nearly $700 million to his invest investors who were out of pocket the losses of money that went into his company. And Donald Trump granted Trevor Milton a full pardon before he paid back a dime to his investors and before he served a day of his prison sentence. So essentially he got off the hook completely. Everything was wiped out by this pardon.
- [18:40]
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- [19:09]
Liz Oyer
And how did he get that pardon? Well, there's two notable things. One is that he hired a very well connected lawyer, Brad Bondi, who happens to be the brother of the Attorney General Pam Bondi. And two is he donated nearly $2 million to Donald Trump's campaign right before he came into office. So Trevor Milton, you know, pushed some magic buttons and he ends up with a full pardon, despite the fact that he is someone who really under no calculation, deserves to get that type of relief. And the relief was very damaging to the victims of, of his crime, who will not get the money that he was otherwise legally required to pay back to them.
- [19:52]
Joanna Coles
So it is hard to understand from a political point of view what advantage this brings Donald Trump, because if you're one of those many people that invested in Nikola, you are not thrilled to know that Trevor Milton is now out because you've seen the process up close. Why is Donald Trump doing this? Do you think it's anything to do with the fact that in the four years between the first Trump administration and the second, and of course, he had no idea in those four years that he would be. Well, he had no certainty he would be reelected. And he was facing his own trials, he went through his own trials. He might have faced jail himself. And we know he's slightly haunted by jail. Is this some sort of psychological tick that he's got that he hears a story? He hears it on the golf course where a lot of businessmen, and he claims to have been a businessman, make decisions anyway, and he's just sort of, of oddly displaying a rare shred of empathy. I mean, what is triggering this for him? Because it's not very useful politically.
- [20:55]
Liz Oyer
I don't think empathy has anything to do with it. I think it's about power fundamentally. I think that he feels powerful when he's able to do something that brings him instant gratification. And the pardon power is totally unrestrained. There's nothing that Congress can do, there's nothing that the courts can do to check it or limit it. So Donald Trump likes the pardon power. He can literally sign his signature on a piece of paper and it's done and nobody can question it or try to unravel it. So I think pardons make him feel powerful. I think he also likes to be able to hold the possibility of pardons over other people. He dangles the possibility of a pardon in many high profile cases. He's done this even without actually granting the pardon. So he's been asked many times, will you pardon Sean Combs Diddy? Will you pardon Glenn Maxwell the co conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein. And he never, ever says no. He says, I could. I'm allowed to. I haven't decided. I haven't thought about it. And that is a power in and of itself, because it keeps people on the hook. It keeps people bending over backwards to do anything they can think of to please him or ingratiate themselves with him in the hope of getting a pardon. So I think he likes that aspect of it as well. And I think that he tends to grant pardons to people in whom he sees something of himself. There's one pardon in particular. I mean, there's really no way to explain why he did it, other than that he felt sort of a kinship with this person, and that's the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez. He was convicted, yes, he was convicted of this massive drug conspiracy, essentially corrupting his own country, turning it into a narco state. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison in the United States. He'd served only about a year of his sentence, and Donald Trump granted him full pardon at the same time that the Trump administration is blowing boats out of the water because they're supposedly carrying drugs to the United States. This is somebody who was convicted of trafficking, I believe, about 500 tons of cocaine. Yeah. I mean, incredible pace.
- [23:08]
Joanna Coles
An incredible pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez. I mean, an incredible pardon.
- [23:13]
Liz Oyer
It makes no sense in any way, shape or form other than that Donald Trump saw a fellow foreign leader who had ravaged his country, corrupted it in all the ways that, you know, Donald Trump seems to think a leader is entitled to, and he granted him a full pardon. And it's completely contrary to the stated drug policy of his administration. I think a lot of people highly placed in his own administration had some issues with this pardon, but he just did it seemingly on an impulse, and. And it just reflects sort of his character. There's a pardon scholar, Jeffrey Toobin, who has said that pardons are an X ray into the soul of the president. They tell you something about who the president really is as a person. And that seems quite true with Donald Trump's pardons.
- [24:02]
Joanna Coles
Yeah, you can't imagine that Marco Rubio feels good about that because he keeps. Well, he and Pete Hegseth, you know, obviously the Secretary of State and the Secretary for Defense, slash war, keep banging on about the drugs that are coming in and, you know, damaging the US and yet someone who supplied 500 tons of cocaine is miraculously released from jail. I also saw that Trump at the time said, oh, it was a Biden witch hunt. It was a Biden witch hunt. So he's obviously got the sort of political witch hunt still very much at the front of his brain about it. So, Liz, one of the claims that the Democrats, Democrats are making is we need to get back into Congress. The minute we're back, we're going to hold the current administration to account and we're going to try and impeach everybody. And, you know, there's been a lot of talk about jailing, especially for the the action going on in the Caribbean over the little boats that are being blown up and whether or not this is in contravention of international law laws. Is it possible for Donald Trump to pardon himself and his entire cabinet, if necessary, from any kind of future legal action?
- [25:21]
Liz Oyer
I think it is not only possible, but likely that Donald Trump will very broadly grant pardons to members of his administration who may have committed crimes in the course of their official duties. And that certainly could include include Pete Hegseth, it could include Pam Bondi, the attorney general, Stephen Miller, who's as advisor. And it also, frankly, could include large numbers of people like the ICE agents who are carrying out his immigration agenda, people who we have seen behave in ways that are really inappropriately violent against the people they're arresting against protesters. So he really could wipe out a lot of potential liability for people who have been complicit in the agenda of his administration by granting pardons. And frankly, it would not surprise me if he has already written some of those parts pardons and signed them and has them stashed in a drawer somewhere just in case something should happen to him to make sure that the people who have worked for him in this administration are protected in terms of pardoning himself. There's not a clear answer under the law as to whether the president can pardon himself. The Justice Department in the era of Richard Nixon took the position that that Nixon could not pardon himself, that that's not a legal authority of the president. But that's never been settled by a court. And ultimately the supr court would likely have to be the final decider of that. I will say, however, that the court has extended the president such broad immunity already through their decision in that presidential immunity case before Trump came back into office, that it seems to have emboldened him. He knows that he's not likely to be able to be held accountable criminally for anything he's doing during his presidency, and therefore he probably won't need a pardon because of the broad legal immunity that the Supreme Court has already given than him.
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Joanna Coles
Can you Tell us also about the five NFL players that got pardoned last week.
- [27:20]
Liz Oyer
Yeah, this was a very odd one, because it doesn't seem that most of these folks had actually asked for a pardon. Donald Trump just sort of spontaneously pardoned five former NFL players. One of them is actually deceased. He's been dead for years now, so really has no need whatsoever for a pardon. And one of the players gave an interview, I believe it was Jamal Lewis who played for Baltimore Ravens. And he gave an interview in which he said that he was incredibly shocked to receive this phone call telling him that he'd gotten a pardon and that it was welcome, but he had no expectation of receiving a pardon because he hadn't applied for a pardon. So it's unclear why Trump did this. He clearly thought that there was some constituency that he could ingratiate himself to by pardoning these former football players, but there really wasn't any specific request, it seems like, for the pardons. There wasn't any specific need that he was addressing. He just decided to do a. It probably for some cynical purpose that involved appealing to a certain constituency of maybe NFL fans.
- [28:25]
Joanna Coles
I mean, it's fascinating, the idea of showering pardons on people who are sitting in jail, serving their time because they were guilty. They know that they're not even asking for a partner, like, I'm doing my time.
- [28:36]
Liz Oyer
So let me just say about that. Pardons are actually typically reserved for people who have served their entire sentence and they've paid their debts to society. Donald Trump is the rare, I think, the only president that I'm aware of who has widely granted pardons to people who have not served any of their time or who have served very little of their time. The Justice Department's manual on pardons says that you can't even be considered for a pardon until you are five years out from completing your sentence, and that would mean out of prison. The Justice Department would also look to see that you've paid back any money that you might owe to victims of crimes, things like that, before you could even be considered for a pardon. Trump has thrown all of that out the window. And the pardoning of people like Paul Walsack and Trevor Milton, who've served zero time, is just really unusual.
- [29:26]
Joanna Coles
Well, and also that they have to pay no restitution, that the victims get nothing here, which, you know. And Trevor Milton, I think, still had $180 million left from the money he had taken in that he wasn't. He. He wasn't under any pressure whatsoever to give back LifeLock.
- [29:44]
Liz Oyer
How can I help. The IRS said I filed my return,
- [29:47]
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- [29:51]
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- [29:52]
Liz Oyer
My refund, though. I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this.
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- [30:00]
Liz Oyer
I'm so relieved.
- [30:02]
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- [30:02]
Liz Oyer
I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [30:04]
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- [30:13]
Liz Oyer
Yeah, yeah. The the restitution piece of it is also unprecedented. Most presidents have avoided granting pard anybody who still owes a significant amount of money to their victims. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has used the pardon power to wipe out incredibly large amounts of debts that are owed to taxpayers and victims of crimes. I have done all the calculations, tallied it up. He has forgiven over one and a half billion dollars in debts owed to victims and taxpayers through the use of clemency, which is truly historic and extraordinary. He's also done it seemingly without consulting any of the victims who are owed the money, which is normally in normal times a required step in the process. But he has dispensed with that piece of it as well.
- [31:03]
Joanna Coles
Just astonishing. That must mean there are a lot of very angry victims out there who probably won't be voting for the Republicans again, I would assume. And I love Jeffrey Toobin, who's been on this podcast. I love his observation that pardons are an X ray into the soul of the person who's pardoning. So why do you think? And of course, the first day Donald Trump came in, he blanket pardoned Everybody involved with January 6th, which got a sort of bit of attention. But then that first month was so aggressive in terms of the rollout of various of his policies that it never quite got perhaps the attention it deserved. Why do you think people aren't more up in arms about this? Because in a sense, it's a very easy political story to understand. People are guilty. They're either paying to get out of jail, or Donald Trump is behaving like a king out of a storybook where he's just free to pardon people. Why aren't people more angry about this?
- [32:04]
Liz Oyer
Well, I think the pardon power is not well understood, which has lent itself to this narrative that Trump is trying to push, that all presidents do this, that every president politicizes the justice system and then pardons whomever they want. It's not true, but he has very aggressively pushed that narrative. And unfortunately, the pardon power power has always been such sort of an obscure and opaque part of the presidential powers that people don't fully understand necessarily how abnormal it is what Donald Trump is doing with the pardon power. Now, I think that if, if there were a better understanding of it, there might be more outrage. But another factor is there are a lot of outrageous stories right now that are competing for people's attention. And so to focus on any one pardon is not always so easy, but it really is just such, such a damaging, dangerous thing that he's doing to the justice system. And one thing that underscores that is we have now seen that many of the January 6th pardon recipients have ended up back in prison. There are actually dozens of them that have been rearrested and charged with new crimes and in many cases, convicted of new crimes since they received the pardons. And some of them are very serious crimes. There are quite a few who've been convicted of crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children. That's a result of the failure to vet these individuals and the failure to give any careful review to who these folks are before granting them the pardon. So it's actually very dangerous to the American people, and it's damaging to the integrity of our justice system. And so we should be outraged about it. But there are just so many things to be outraged about right now that it's hard to pick a focus.
- [33:53]
Joanna Coles
So we heard in the clip that we played at the beginning of the show, Savannah Chrisley, referring to the fact that Joe Biden, Biden pardoned his son. Hunter, you were the pardons attorney under which that happened. How damaging do you think it was for the system as a whole that Joe Biden chose to do that?
- [34:14]
Liz Oyer
I think it was quite damaging, actually, that Biden chose to pardon his son. His son's application did not go through the ordinary review process. So there was no opportunity or request for the Justice Department or my office to weigh in on the wisdom of that decision. But had we been asked, had I been asked, the answer would have been that this will delegitimize the pardon power in the eyes of the public. If you do this, also, it's unfair to the people who are waiting their turn, who also are desperate to receive pardons, but don't have the last name Biden if you let your son jump the line in this way and give him special treatment. So I do think it was quite damaging. I don't think that what Biden did is on the same scale or anywhere close to what Trump did in terms of corrupting the pardon power. But Trump has effectively used the pardon of Hunter Biden to spin his own narrative that every president does this, and it's no president has ever done it to the same degree as Donald Trump is doing it. But certainly the pardon of Hunter Biden has helped to fuel Trump's own narrative about the pardon power.
- [35:24]
Joanna Coles
Right. And you kind of hear people say, I know I've tried to have this conversation with people, and, and people are like, well, Biden pardoned his own son, so what are you going to do? It's a kind of everybody, everybody's at. Everybody's doing it. But as you say, the scale that Donald Trump is doing it on is just unprecedented. So we've talked about pardons, and that's certainly one thing that is going on. But you've also noticed that there's an increasing disregard for what the courts are actually asking for. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Because that also seems to be something that people should be alarmed about.
- [35:57]
Liz Oyer
Yeah. This administration has literally declared itself to be at war with the courts. Todd Blanch, the deputy attorney general and formerly Trump's personal attorney, has used the term war to describe the relationship between judges and the Justice Department, which is absolutely unprecedented. In normal times, the Justice Department enjoys sort of a presumption of credibility with the courts. It's a repeat player. It's a respected institution. But that has all fallen apart in, in large part because we've seen the Justice Department repeatedly, over and over again, violate or orders of courts. And there was a really remarkable filing that DOJ made in New Jersey just recently in which a judge ordered them to state under oath in a sworn declaration how many cases they were aware of in which they had violated orders of the district court in New Jersey, which is just one of 94 federal courts around the country in cases involving immigration. And a high level DOJ official, actually the chief of staff to Todd Blanch, signed a sworn declaration saying that in just two months, the justice violated 56 different court orders, only in New Jersey in immigration cases, specifically 56 court orders.
- [37:14]
Joanna Coles
And what, what, what sort of restitution is there for that? If you're a judge and your order is not being acted upon, what are you supposed to do?
- [37:24]
Liz Oyer
So judges can hold lawyers in contempt of court? It's extremely unusual, but we actually saw that happen for the first time in memory in Minnesota also within the last week or so in an immigration case. The court there is experiencing a similar issue where they've found that doj has violated dozens of court orders in, in just recent weeks and it's a repeated, persistent problem. So a judge actually imposed a sanction of contempt of court on a lawyer there to try to correct their behavior. Judges around the country are experiencing this problem of DOJ refusing to comply with orders. They are fed up with it. They are pushing back on it. And the Justice Department is really going to have to some changes in how they do business or the lawyers that represent the Justice Department in court are not going to be able to practice anymore because they will risk having their law licenses taken away. So it's really a critical problem and it's one that we're seeing around the country and it's one that GOJ is going to have to urgently remediate if they're going to be able to continue to appear in court.
- [38:30]
Joanna Coles
And if the House of Representatives changes at the midterms, and even if possible, the Senate goes Democrat, do these issues get resolved?
- [38:42]
Liz Oyer
Well, it will be easier for the Democrats to conduct oversight of the Justice Department and to ensure that they have to answer the tough questions and they have to be accountable to the American people. There's no quick fix, but if the Democrats take the majority, they will be able to conduct more investigations and ensure more effective and intensive oversight of the justice, the Justice Department's conduct.
- [39:08]
Joanna Coles
If people do feel angry about this, or if you are a victim who's been swindled by one of these characters who's not had to serve any jail time and doesn't have to worry about restitution, what is the most effective thing you think you can do at this point?
- [39:24]
Liz Oyer
Well, I think that we will have an opportunity in the midterm elections to vote. And I think that we should be looking at what our existing elected leaders and what candidates who are hoping to be elected have said about these pardons. Congress has played almost no role in reining in the president's use of pardon powers. We have not seen oversight hearings focused on pardons. We haven't seen the types of demands for explanations and transparency that I would expect. I would expect that there would be bipartisan outcry about pardons like the one of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the president of Honduras, the pardon of Changpeng Zhao, which directly enriched the Trump family. But we haven't seen that type of outrage from Congress. And I think that that's something that we should be expecting and asking from those that we are thinking of voting for in November. I also think that we should be supporting and advocating for laws that would bring more Transparency to the pardon process. It's hard to rein in the pardon power because it's a constitutional power, and only a constitutional amendment, which would be very hard to achieve, could limit it. But Congress could enact legisl legislation that would require disclosures of all of these corrupt financial transactions that are happening behind the scenes, which I believe we've only seen the tip of the iceberg on to date. And that's something that I think that Americans deserve to be able to see and understand. Who exactly is benefiting from these pardons? Who is enriching themselves by lobbying for pardons? What is the Trump family getting out of these pardons? And all of that has been quite opaque to date.
- [41:06]
Joanna Coles
Well, and what is the head of the doj, Pam Bondi's brother, getting out of these two? I mean, just astonishing that he's able to pull this off.
- [41:16]
Liz Oyer
Yeah, that's actually a whole. We, we could do a whole conversation about this special treatment that has been given to the clients of Brad Bondi, Pam Bondi's brother, since she became the Attorney General. He has had some really remarkable wins in which the Justice Department has dismissed charges against clients of his and intervened on behalf his clients in other litigations. So the corruption of the justice system is really thorough at this point, and many people are profiting off of it in ways that we should discuss in a future episode.
- [41:49]
Joanna Coles
Okay, well, we can definitely come back and do a special on Brad Bondi. I'm fascinated. The fact that Trump has, you know, put in two of his former personal lawyers, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, to run the DOJ at this point, it is his own doj, as we saw from that enormous banner he unfurled outside the DOJ last week. And as you constantly use the word unprecedented, and it's constantly used with the second administration of Donald Trump, and yet still it seems to go on. Well, the other thing I would suggest people do is to follow you on Instagram. You're meticulous in the way you cover this stuff. I became completely, completely sort of gripped by your. It feels like daily updates. You've really done sterling work. Thank you very much for joining us. And you must come back. And we will. We will dig deep into Brad Bondi.
- [42:40]
Liz Oyer
Thanks so much, Joanna. I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk with you.
- [42:44]
Joanna Coles
It's great to have you. As we've just heard. And before you go, there's so much to scream about. So I wanted to tell you about Primal Scream, my new substack where we stop pretending that this moment is about policy papers or reasoned debate. And we call it what it is. It's a daily parade of gross human appetites. Lust, greed, envy, ambition, pride, betrayal, wrath. The seven deadly sins never went away, they just. Just got rebranded under Trump. So I'll be prizing open the motivations driving this Trump era chaos and everything orbiting it. The billionaires, the beauty myths, the boardroom deals, the scandals, the status games, the reinventions and the downfalls. It's politics as theatre, celebrity as currency and wellness as religion. And the only real language in the room, power, of course. Just head to the link in the description box and sign up before the launch. Just go to Beast Pub Scream. That's Beast Pub Scream. And the first screams are coming. So the good news is we have so many Beast Tier members now, there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support. Thanks to our production team. Devon Rogerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, Neil Rosenhaus.