I am a painter and a writer and a commentator with my podcast, In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer. I’m also a political observer and have been since the 1970s and 80s, when I was on the other side. I was a Republican activist in the far evangelical Christian right that has now morphed into the right-wing Christian nationalist movement that backs Donald Trump.
One of our claims back then, and still the claim of many evangelicals who put Trump in the White House, including the Pentecostal charismatic Christians and conservative Roman Catholics who backed him, and in the MAGA movement still back him, was that they accused liberals and left-wingers of being lawless, or at least coddling criminals. So how does one explain the pardon industry that Trump has created?
The criminal kickback system where friends of his pay money to him directly or indirectly and get their buddies pardoned. And that doesn’t even include the January 6th rioters. Today, the New York Times had an interesting recap of this. Their article names names and gives a few details that all but the most immoral and amoral Americans, Republican or Democrat, Christian or atheist, Jewish or Muslim, would find shocking. It goes against everything all of us say we believe.
I accuse the Republicans of gross hypocrisy in talking about two things, family values and being against crime, in the light of their criminal in chief. That’s who Donald Trump is, the most corrupt president in American history. Forget generalities. Let’s look at some of the details of the pardon industry of kickbacks.
He’s benefited from it. His family and friends have benefited from it. And that has become something that we just kind of accept. Okay, yes, I know there’s a war going on in Iran. I know that all sorts of other issues are happening, but don’t forget this one as you look at the midterms. Trump’s created a veritable pardon industry, as the Times put it, in which people with White House connections accept payments for wealthy convicts.
Among those on whom he’s bestowed freedom are dozens of people convicted of the most serious forms of fraud, ripping off other Americans, destroying their life savings, stealing money, Bernie Madoff, all that kind of behavior, Ponzi schemes, the things we all hate being caught up in, the kind of crap on my cell phone and email as an older American of people trying to rip me off.
That’s what he pardons. He’s also pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, a former president of Honduras who helped traffic hundreds of tons, hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States, and Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a life sentence for running Silk Road, a sprawling criminal enterprise that sold drugs. At the same time as Pete Hegseth is blowing up boats in the Caribbean and other places that he accuses of being drug runners, his boss, the criminal in chief, is pardoning drug dealers, big-time drug dealers.
These are not fake news, left-wing media, New York Times facts. This is something you can check out anywhere. And if you voted for Trump, this is what you did to us. There seems to be no crime too ugly for Trump to pardon and no criminal too gross or obvious for him to pardon.
Worst of all, Trump’s issued pardons on the first day of his second term to everyone who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He did not distinguish between rioters who were relatively peaceful and those who attacked police officers with intent to kill, hitting them in the head and the face with heavy objects. As Vice President JD Vance said should be the case, all 1,500 or so of the January 6 rioters received a clean slate. And JD Vance has gone along with this.
The results have been disastrous. At least 12 pardoned rioters have since been charged with other serious crimes. You know, we blame parole boards for letting people out who then go on and rape and kill. Well, they’re nothing compared to Trump. Listen to this.
Including child molestation. Okay, family values Americans, raping children, anyone? Jeffrey Epstein, anyone? Well, Trump’s pardoning child rapists, okay? Harassment, murder plots, charges related to vicious dog attacks. The outcome was predictable. Critics, including this board, that’s the board of editors at the Wall Street Journal, as well as the New York Times, as well as any reputable news organization, even Fox News, had warned Trump that pardons would embolden the rioters by signaling that crime has no consequences. That’s what he’s done.
And he himself is a mobster criminal. His family has made over $1 billion in his first year of the presidency. Bitcoin, pyramid schemes, all the rest of it. Now he wants to sign our currency with his name and build a golden tower as a presidential museum. Well, I have news for Donald Trump. Those of us who survive him will make sure that his memory is wiped clean from the slate of American history.
We’re all sick of this. Think of this. The American public, and that’s the voting public, deserves, as we go into the midterms, to understand the mayhem that the January 6th pardons alone, not counting the others, have unleashed. Among 12 serious recidivists whom we are aware of, four were in jail or prison at the time of the pardon, and they quickly went on to commit more serious crimes.
On March 5, a court in Florida sentenced Andrew Paul Johnson to life in prison. Okay? This is after Trump pardoned him for molesting a 12-year-old boy and a girl of the same age. These are 12-year-olds. Trump pardoned a guy who molested 12-year-olds.
To keep the children quiet, Johnson is said to have promised to give them part of his January 6th restitution payment from the federal government that he claimed he would receive. Okay, this is a criminal Trump pardon who goes on to rape children and then wants to shut the kids up by giving money to them that Trump says he would get in restitution for being, quote, falsely arrested for attacking our Capitol. This is the scum Trump has unleashed on us.
He used the online gaming platform Discord and Roblox to reach out to the children after Trump freed him from prison. On January 6th, Johnson entered the Capitol through a broken window and attacked a police officer. That’s who Trump pardoned.
In the past two months, Jake Lang destroyed an ice sculpture outside the Minnesota State Capitol, leading to a felony vandalism charge, and helped organize an anti-Muslim rally in New York City that turned violent. That’s who Trump pardoned. Violence in the Capitol, violence in New York. On January 6th, he had been caught on camera storming the Capitol with a baseball bat and a riot shield, which prosecutors said he used to attack police officers. So much for law and order.
In May, Zachary Alam was arrested for breaking into a house in Virginia and stealing a tablet computer and a diamond necklace. On January 6th, he was among the first to enter the Capitol, as video evidence showed, and hurled items at police officers from a balcony. At his sentence hearing, he was unrepentant and said, sometimes you have to break the rules to do what’s right.
He had previous convictions for auto theft and driving under the influence. These are Trump’s buddies, just like Epstein was his buddy. Trump runs in a criminal circle. He pardons criminals. His friends pay to have them pardoned. Kickbacks are involved. This is who Trump is. These are his buddies.
Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the far-right Proud Boys, scuffled with protesters at a news conference and was briefly detained on assault charges a month after Trump freed him from a 22-year prison sentence. Tarrio was one of the leaders behind the January 6th attack, but was not in Washington on the day of the riot. Typical right-wing leader, like Trump himself, draft dodger, now sending people like my son who was in the Marine Corps to war. The draft dodger sends them to war.
The mobster who ran a casino business with close ties to the mob in New York and New Jersey now runs our country and processes other criminals out, including big-time drug dealers. That’s who Trump is. Tarrio had been kicked out of the city after vandalizing a black church after an earlier Trump rally.
An additional eight January 6th rioters were out of prison when Trump pardoned them and have since been charged with new crimes. Another eight charged with new crimes. On March 25, a judge sentenced Daniel Toki to four years in prison for possession of more than 110,000 child pornography images. Wow. You know? The high and mighty do the Epstein thing and the low scum that Trump pardons do the same thing on their own.
During the January 6th riot, he had joined the mob as it broke into the Capitol and destroyed and took government property. On March 1st, Brian Bettencourt grabbed a woman’s hair on the Washington Metro, leading to an assault charge for assault and battery. At least two women have also accused him of stalking. He was already on probation for burglary conviction when he stormed the Capitol. So he’s on probation for burglary, stormed the Capitol, Trump pardons him, and helped rioters circulate furniture that most likely was used as weapons.
In October, Christopher Moynihan threatened to kill Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, and pleaded guilty to a harassment charge over the incident. On January 6th, he had been among the first rioters to breach police barricades and eventually broke into the Senate chamber.
Robert Packer was arrested in September after his dogs attacked people, putting four in hospital. He previously had a long criminal record that included theft and drunken driving. And during the January 6th riot, he wore a Camp Auschwitz anti-Semitic t-shirt.
John Andres violated a legal order requested by the mother of his child by repeatedly following and confronting her, leading to a sentence in June of 60 days in jail and three years of unsupervised probation. On January 6th, he had entered the Capitol through a broken window and pushed police officers aside.
Brent Holdridge was arrested in May for stealing tens of thousands of dollars worth of industrial copper wire. On January 6th, he was scheduled to be in jail on a separate drug-related charge, but he skipped his booking to join the mob as it breached the Capitol.
These are Trump supporters. This is the hardcore MAGA right here, criminals. Jonathan Munafo was arrested last year after he allegedly fled federal supervision and made dozens of menacing phone calls, including one in which he threatened to, quote, cut the throat of a 911 dispatcher. During the riots, he punched police officers twice, stole a riot shield, and used a wooden flagpole to try to break a window.
Days after he was pardoned, Matthew Huddle is said to have resisted arrest during a traffic stop, and a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed him. The police said he had a gun. On January 6th, he had helped take over the Capitol and joined other rioters in chanting, whose house? Our house.
This list, according to the New York Times, does not include at least 27 rioters who committed other crimes before they received their pardons. That group includes one woman who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing someone while drunk driving, and a man who live-streamed a bomb threat while driving around Barack Obama’s neighborhood in Washington.
How can the nation hold Trump accountable for these corrupt, paid-for, kickback pardons through friends of his? The only answer is public opinion at its most tangible manifestation, and it’s called election results. In this year’s midterms, he and the Republican Party he leads deserve to pay a political price for these pardons, as well as for a lot of other things.
Don’t forget the pardons. They’re part of a pattern. Yet Trump supporters still support the rioters through supporting Trump that happened that day. Congressional Republicans are even worse. For the most part, they back him up.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said, referring to the blanket pardon, “I stand with him on it.” It’s absolutely reprehensible. And these are the people who have encouraged ICE into our streets to arrest criminal illegal aliens, as they call them. And instead, ICE is rounding up ordinary moms and dads and other church-going Americans. Yes, I say Americans. They’ve been here for years. They are as American as you and me. Even though one of my ancestors was the first mate on the second voyage of the Mayflower, okay? They’re as American as you and me. We’re all immigrants here.
And not the criminals. The criminals that have been arrested instead have been pardoned by Donald Trump. The violence that the pardon writers continue to commit all across our country is a lie that goes on being told by Donald Trump, who won’t admit what he did.
It’s a lie told by every single Republican who doesn’t admit what these pardons were about. The rest of us have a right to hold Trump and his miserable enablers and the Republican Party and his miserable, lick-spittle, sycophant, wannabe President JD Vance to account. They have done a disgusting, reprehensible thing that alone would have brought down any other presidency and must not be forgotten.
