In the final hours of the Trump Presidency, the White House announced pardons for 73 individuals and 70 who had their sentences commuted.
The number of pardons for an outgoing President isn’t high. But a number of them were the President’s old cohorts.
Among the pardoned and commuted are:
Anthony Levandowski
The former Google engineer was charged for industrial espionage for stealing information about Google’s self-driving car before becoming a department head at Uber. He was pardoned.
Steve Bannon
The political strategist and Trump’s key advisor in the the 2016 election, formerly executive chairman of Breitbart News, was arrested and charged for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and defrauding donors raising funds for a campaign called We Build the Wall. The project was intended to build sections of Trump’s planned wall on the Mexican border. Bannon is alleged to have taken $1 million of the over $25 million raised for his personal use and expenses. He was pardoned.
Elliott Broidy
An American venture capitalist and fundraiser for the Republicans, Broidy was charged in autumn last year for allegedly acting as an unregistered foreign agent while lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests to end the U.S. fraud investigation into 1MDB, a Malaysian investment fund.
He was involved in Trump’s 2016 campaign and sat on his inaugural committee. He has been pardoned.
Ken Kurson
A political consultant, journalist and author, Kurson is close with Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who made Kurson editor of The New York Observer, when he was its publisher. In October, last year, he was indicted for allegedly cyberstalking and harassing a physician in 2015. The allegations against him were revealed during an FBI background check when he was briefly considered for a role in the Trump administration in 2018. He was pardoned.
Lil Wayne
The rapper, real name Dwayne Carter, who was pictured posing with Trump in the last days of the 2020 election campaign, was charged for illegally possessing a gold-plated handgun on a private plane by a Miami court in December. He was pardoned.
Kwame Kilpatrick
Formerly Detroit mayor, Kilpatrick was sentenced to 28 years on charges of racketeering, bribery and extortion in 2013. His sentence was commuted.
Kodak Black
Black was sentenced to three years and ten months in prison in 2019 after pleading guilty to a weapons charge. the rapper sought compassionate release and promised in a tweet, now deleted, that he would give $1 million to charity if he was pardoned. His sentence was commuted.
Trump’s pardons have been met with outrage from actors across America’s political stage. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, took to Twitter to “thank God”, that “we have only 12 more hours of this den of thieves.”
Earlier today, Trump left the White House for the final team. At Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, he got an explosive send-off – a 21-gun salute, from four cannons – before flying to Florida.
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