Presidential Pardons: Where they came from, how they have been used
Sidestory: The Iowan who benefitted from the presidential power of pardon
Joe Biden’s full pardon of his son, Hunter, was not the first presidential pardon of a family member.
Neither was Donald Trump’s pardon of his daughter’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner – a pardon that cleared the way for Trump to name Kushner as his Ambassador to France, one of the most coveted of all diplomatic positions.
Nor was Bill Clinton’s pardon of his brother, Roger Clinton, Jr.
Who then?
Well, it was the president often ranked as the greatest among the almost two-and-one-half centuries of American presidents.
Abraham Lincoln granted amnesty, which is a close cousin to a pardon, to Emilie Todd Helm. She was his sister-in-law, more specifically the half-sister of Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.
Emilie Todd had married Benjamin Helm, who was schooled at Harvard University and West Point. With the Civil War at hand, Lincoln offered him a position in the Union Army. He declined, opting to fight for the Confederacy instead.
He died in the Battle of Chickamauga, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, in September 1863. It was the second-largest casualty event in the Civil War with a total of 34,000 soldiers dead or wounded.
His widow, Emilie Todd Helm, found her way north from her home in Kentucky to Washington, D.C., where the Lincolns took her in at the White House.
The President tried to keep her presence there from becoming public knowledge. The effort was not entirely successful, however, at one point prompting Lincoln to tell an inquirer to, in effect, mind his own damn business. Union General Daniel Sickles told Lincoln that it was not right for him to have a supporter of the Confederacy in his home. “General Sickles,” Lincoln replied, “My wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in the matter.”
Following the war, Lincoln, seeking a way to reintegrate the South with the North, provided a path for Confederates to receive amnesty. All they had to do was to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. Emilie, however, declined to take the oath. Lincoln then granted her amnesty, clearing the way for her return to Kentucky without fear of prosecution.
The power of a presidential pardon may be one of the broadest and most powerful actions a president has. It is irreversible and absolute.
The history of presidential pardons is a kind of mini-history of America
The first pardons were granted by the nation’s first president, George Washington, to the perpetrators of an armed rebellion against the federal government by a group of farmer/whiskey producers in Western Pennsylvania. The distillers were angered by the federal government’s taxation of spirits – the nation’s first tax and a major source of revenue for the federal government in the 1790s.
Washington sent a militia of 13,000 men to restore order. Twenty of the rebels were arrested and two of the leaders were convicted of treason and sentenced to be hanged. Washington saw the revolt as a threat to the future of a young nation and wanted to resolve the discontent while putting the matter behind him. The execution of the rebels was not likely to achieve these goals. He, thus, pardoned the two men awaiting the gallows in 1795. A third leader of the rebellion was pardoned by Washington’s successor, John Adams.
Since then, only two presidents have not exercised their power to pardon. Both – William Henry Harrison and James Garfield – died within their first six months in office.
By far, the greatest number of presidential pardons, several hundred thousand in number, have been granted to masses of unnamed people involved in specific illegal activities. Many of these pardons were made as times changed, as the original offense came to be regarded a less serious threat to the country than originally perceived.
One example is President Jimmy Carter’s pardon of more than 200,000 men who resisted the draft in the Vietnam War era. The pardon was granted in 1977, almost four years after the war ended.
The mass group pardons trend began early in America’s history
Some examples:
All persons convicted of violating the Sedition Act of 1798, mostly by criticizing or making fun of the federal government, were pardoned by President Thomas Jefferson in 1801.
A group of pirates that aided the U.S. military in the War of 1812 was pardoned by President James Madison in 1815.
About 300 Sioux Indians convicted and sentenced to death for leading an uprising in Minnesota after the Indians were forcibly displaced from their native lands were pardoned by President Lincoln in 1862.
Three years after the end of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson pardoned all members of the Confederacy.
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints who had engaged in polygamous marriages were pardoned by President Benjamin Harrison in 1893.
President Biden pardoned 6,500 persons convicted of simple possession of marijuana.
Over the years, the presidential pardons also came to include persons of power and fame. The trend started slowly. One of the first was General John C. Fremont, convicted by court-martial of mutiny and insubordination in 1848. Fremont was pardoned by President James K. Polk and went on to become the first Republican nominee for president in 1856. He lost to James Buchanan, widely regarded as the worst U. S. president in history.
Buchanan, in turn, produced some controversy when he pardoned Brigham Young, Mormon leader and founder of Salt Lake City, Utah, for his role in the 1857 war between the Mormons and the U.S. Army.
As time progressed, pardons began to be granted to a wide range of public officials, top-level business executives, and celebrities.
The list has come to include four governors, six congressmen, four cabinet-level presidential appointees, a mayor, a judge, a New York police commissioner, a three-star general, and a four-star general.
Other pardons of note to widely known personalities:
1921 – Eugene V. Debs, leading activist of the Socialist Party of America; convicted of sedition; pardoned by President Warren G. Harding.
1933 – Duncan Reynaldo, an actor later to play the role of the Cisco Kid in a long-running TV series of the same name in the 1950s; pardoned by President Franklin Roosevelt for illegal entry to the U.S.
1961 – Hank Greenspun, editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun; pardoned by President John F. Kennedy for shipping arms to Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
1971 – Jimmy Hoffa, one of the most widely known labor leaders of the 20th century, convicted of fraud, bribery and tax evasion; pardoned by President Richard Nixon.
1974 – Richard Nixon, the 36th president of the United States; pardoned for his participation in the Watergate scandal by President Gerald Ford.
1975 – Robert E. Lee, top general of the Confederate Army; pardoned for his role in the Civil War by President Gerald Ford.
1977 – Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America; pardoned for his role in the Confederacy and the Civil War by President Carter.
1979 and 2001 – Patty Hearst, newspaper heiress; sentenced for a bank robbery carried out by a group that had kidnapped her; commuted by President Carter, then pardoned by President Bill Clinton.
1989 – George Steinbrenner, principal owner and managing partner of the New York Yankees for more than 35 years beginning in 1973; pardoned by President Ronald Reagan for making illegal campaign contributions to President Nixon.
1989 – Armand Hammer, CEO of the Occidental Petroleum Company, pardoned by President George H. W. Bush for making illegal campaign contributions to President Nixon.
2017 – Willie McCovey, Hall of Fame baseball player, mostly for the San Francisco Giants from 1959 to 1980; pardoned for tax evasion by President Barack Obama.
2018 – Jack Johnson, World Heavyweight Boxing Champion from 1908 to 1915, the first African American to hold the title; convicted of transporting a white woman across state lines, pardoned by President Donald Trump.
Is this what the Founding Fathers intended?
The increasing incidence of pardons for widely known personalities seems a mixed bag. Many of them seem to be well deserved.
But others may not have been what the Founding Fathers envisioned when they decided to write the power of presidential pardon into the Constitution.
Sidestory: An Iowa Connection
At least one Iowan has benefitted from the presidential power of pardon.
Sholom Rubashkin was the CEO of the largest Kosher meat processing plant in America, situated at Postville, Iowa.
The plant was the target of a federal immigration raid in 2008 in which almost 400 undocumented workers were discovered. Rubashkin was charged with 83 counts of child labor violations stemming from the raid, according to a CNN article, The inside story of how a kosher meat kingpin won clemency under Trump by Vicky Ward from August 9, 2019. The remainder of this column is based on Ward’s article.
Rubashkin’s legal troubles were just beginning, however. Subsequent investigations revealed that he had used $300,000 of company money to pay his credit card bills and $200,000 for home improvements; also that he had engaged in witness tampering, tax evasion, and illegal campaign contributions. The financial crimes became the focus; he was sentenced to 27 years in prison and ordered to pay $27 million in restitution.
After serving 14 months in federal prison, President Trump commuted the sentence to time served, a power that falls under the presidential pardons provision.
The negotiators who worked to get Trump to free Rubashkin included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his father, the aforementioned Charles Kushner.
Trump was said to be attracted to the case because he thought it would play well for him with the Jewish community.
Sources for this column include but are not limited to List of people pardoned or granted clemency by the president of the United States, Wikipedia; The History of the Pardon Power, Colleen Shogan, Rubenstein Center Scholarship; 7 Famous Presidential Parsons, Evan Andrews, HISTORY; This Day in History,December 14,1863, President Lincoln pardons his sister-in-law, HISTORY.
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Concurrent with President Ford's pardon of Gen. Lee, the U.S. House voted to restore the rebel general's U.S. citizenship by a vote of 407-10. According to The New York Times, Lee had applied for restoration of citizenship to President Andrew Johnson with the support of Gen. Grant in 1865, but was told he had to sign a loyalty/amnesty oath. He later did, but it was never acted upon and he died a man without a country in 1870. Lee's signed loyalty/amnesty oath was discovered among State Department papers 100 years later. William Seward, having survived an assassination attempt along with his son the same day President Lincoln was shot, was Secretary of State at the time Lee signed and submitted his oath. It was never sent to President Johnson. While a blanket amnesty and pardon had been granted to nearly all Confederate soldiers, Lee was excepted and had to apply separately.
Thank you, Julie. I appreciate the kind words.