Amnesties, Commutations and Pardons

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    Trump Pardons Paul Walczak, Whose Family Sought to Publicize Ashley Biden’s Diary

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    The pardon of Paul Walczak, who had been convicted of tax crimes, comes as the president uses clemency to reward allies and swipe at perceived enemies.President Trump on Wednesday pardoned a Florida health care executive whose mother played a role in trying to expose the contents of Ashley Biden’s diary.The pardon of the executive, Paul Walczak, was signed privately and posted on the Justice Department’s website on Friday. It came less than two weeks after he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution, for tax crimes that prosecutors said were used to finance a lavish lifestyle, including the purchase of a yacht.Mr. Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, who was also involved in the health care industry in Florida, is a longtime Republican donor and fund-raiser who played a role in a surreptitious effort to help Mr. Trump by undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 presidential election.During the campaign, Ms. Fago was contacted by a man who was in possession of a diary kept by Mr. Biden’s daughter, Ashley, as she recovered from addiction, The New York Times previously reported.When first told of the diary, Ms. Fago said she thought it would help Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the election if it was made public, two people familiar with the matter later told The Times. The man, Robert Kurlander, circulated the diary at a fund-raiser at Ms. Fago’s house in Jupiter, Fla., in September 2020.Ms. Fago’s daughter passed along a tip about the diary to Project Veritas, a conservative group that had become a favorite of Mr. Trump’s. Project Veritas later paid $40,000 to Mr. Kurlander and an associate, Aimee Harris, for the diary.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Indicted ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Pays Roger Stone $600,000 to Lobby for Him

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      The longtime Trump ally is lobbying Congress to change the law that the crypto entrepreneur Roger Ver was charged with violating.Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime associate of President Trump’s, has been lobbying for a pioneering cryptocurrency investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus” who is facing federal fraud and criminal tax charges, according to congressional filings.Mr. Stone filed paperwork last month indicating that he had been retained by Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor who was charged last year and accused of shielding his cryptocurrency holdings from $48 million in taxes.Mr. Stone noted in a filing last week that he had been paid $600,000 by Mr. Ver since early February to help his client’s case, partly by trying to abolish the tax provisions at the heart of the charges.Mr. Ver, a former California resident who renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, was arrested last year in Spain, according to the Justice Department, which announced plans at the time to extradite him.Mr. Ver disputed the charges, claiming in a video posted on social media in January that he was being threatened with a possible sentence of more than 100 years in prison because of his political views and his role in promoting cryptocurrency.In the video, which was framed as an appeal to Mr. Trump, Mr. Ver linked his case to the president’s grievances about the weaponization of the justice system.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Freed From Prison by Trump and Now Facing the Prospect of Going Back

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      At a hearing this week, witnesses described behavior by Jonathan Braun that could result in his being locked up again. In the early hours of Feb. 15, Jonathan Braun, a violent felon granted clemency by President Trump, was agitated.After getting into a heated argument with his wife and parents and kicking them out of his cavernous Long Island home, Mr. Braun knocked on the door of his live-in nanny under the pretext of retrieving his phone, which was charging in her room.What followed, according to the former nanny’s testimony on Friday, was a terrifying, degrading encounter. Mr. Braun, shirtless, entered the room, pulled her onto her bed and put her into a headlock, she said. Then he pushed her hand over his bare genitals as he groped her breasts, telling her he had always wanted to have intercourse with her.The nanny said she had wrested herself away from his grasp, escaped to her bathroom and locked herself in.Coming on the second day of a hearing that will determine whether Mr. Braun returns to federal prison, her testimony offered one of the most vivid depictions of the depraved behavior he is accused of engaging in. There were no defense witnesses.Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Braun’s 10-year sentence for drug trafficking at the end of his first term in office. The commutation came after Mr. Braun’s family used its close ties to the father of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser at the time, to secure Mr. Braun’s release.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Says Biden’s Pardons are ‘Void’ and ‘Vacant’ Because of Autopen

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      President Trump wrote on social media on Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, and a range of other people whom Mr. Trump sees as his political enemies, because they were signed using an autopen device.There is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon, and there is no exception to pardons signed by autopen. But Mr. Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric. Implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated.“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on social media on Sunday night. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”The use of autopen is an ordinarily uncontroversial aspect of governance; it was first used to sign a bill into law at the direction of a president in 2011, when former President Barack Obama was traveling in Europe and wanted to sign a piece of legislation that Congress passed extending the Patriot Act another four years.After Mr. Trump posted about the autopen and the pardons Sunday night, a reporter in the traveling press pool on Air Force One asked him to elaborate, and he seemed to briefly back away from the extraordinary idea he had just posted.Would other things Mr. Biden signed as president using an autopen also be considered null and void, he was asked.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Dept. Takes Broad View of Trump’s Jan. 6 Pardons

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      The department has increasingly taken the position that criminal behavior discovered during an investigation stemming from a suspect’s role in the Capitol attack is in fact related to Jan. 6.Four years ago, when F.B.I. agents searched the Florida home of Jeremy Brown, a former Special Forces soldier, in connection with his role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, they found several illegal items: an unregistered assault rifle, two live fragmentation grenades and a classified “trip report” that Mr. Brown wrote while he was in the Army.Mr. Brown was ultimately tried in Tampa on charges of illegally possessing the weapons and the classified material. And after he was convicted, he was sentenced to more than seven years in prison — even before his Jan. 6 indictment had a chance to go in front of a jury.On Tuesday, however, federal prosecutors abruptly declared that because the second case was related to Jan. 6, it was covered by the sprawling clemency proclamation that President Trump issued on his first day in office to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack.And if a judge eventually agrees with that assessment, it could mean that Mr. Brown — whose Jan. 6 charges were already wiped out by the presidential pardon — will get to go free on his other case as well.The Justice Department’s position with regard to Mr. Brown is not the first time it has said in recent days that separate criminal cases emerging from the investigation of Jan. 6 — especially those involving weapons discovered during searches — should be covered by Mr. Trump’s sweeping reprieves.Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, advanced that view on Tuesday in the case of another pardoned Jan. 6 defendant, Daniel Edwin Wilson.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Has the Same Idea in Mind for Ukraine and the Department of Justice

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      I grew up a Reagan Republican in the middle of the Cold War, and I never thought I’d see the day when the president of the United States became the world’s most prominent and effective Russian propagandist.Yet that’s exactly what happened last week, when President Trump began a diplomatic offensive against the nation of Ukraine and the person of President Volodymyr Zelensky.This month, the administration couldn’t seem to get its message straight. First it seemed to want to offer unilateral concessions to the Russian government — including by taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table and recognizing Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine — only to walk back the concessions days (or hours) later.The cumulative effect was confusing. What was the administration’s position on Ukraine? Last week, however, the words and actions of the administration left us with no doubt — the United States is taking Russia’s side in the conflict.What other conclusion should we draw when Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, begins peace negotiations with Russia without Ukraine or any of our NATO allies at the table, dangling “historic economic and investment opportunities” for Russia if the conflict ends?What other conclusion should we draw when Trump demands ruinous economic concessions from Ukraine to compensate America for its prior aid? He’s demanding a higher share of gross domestic product from Ukraine than the victorious Allies demanded from Germany after World War I.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hegseth Fires Military’s Top JAG Lawyers in Pursuit of ‘Warrior Ethos’

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      The defense secretary has repeatedly derided the military lawyers for war crime prosecutions and battlefield rules of engagement.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to fire the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force represents an opening salvo in his push to remake the military into a force that is more aggressive on the battlefield and potentially less hindered by the laws of armed conflict.Mr. Hegseth, in the Pentagon and during his meetings with troops last week in Europe, has spoken repeatedly about the need to restore a “warrior ethos” to a military that he insists has become soft, social-justice obsessed and more bureaucratic over the past two decades.His decision to replace the military’s judge advocate generals — typically three-star military officers — offers a sense of how he defines the ethos that he has vowed to instill.The dismissals came as part of a broader push by Mr. Hegseth and President Trump, who late Friday also fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the country’s top military officer, as well as the first woman to lead the Navy and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force.By comparison, the three fired judge advocate generals, also known as “JAGs,” are far less prominent. Inside the Pentagon and on battlefields around the world, military lawyers aren’t decision makers. Their job is to provide independent legal advice to senior military officers so that they do not run afoul of U.S. law or the laws of armed conflict.Senior Pentagon officials said that Mr. Hegseth has had no contact with any of the three fired uniform military lawyers since taking office. None of the three — Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III, Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer and Rear Adm. Lia M. Reynolds — were even named in the Pentagon statement announcing their dismissal from decades of military service.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Curtails Anti-Corruption Efforts, as Aides Seek End to Eric Adams Case

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      Two nearly simultaneous moves by the Trump administration on Monday signaled a new and far more transactional approach to the Justice Department’s handling of corruption cases.In the evening, President Trump signed an executive order halting investigations and prosecutions of corporate corruption in foreign countries, arguing such cases hurt the United States’ competitive edge. “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” he said of his decision to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.Around the same time, a top Justice Department official directed federal prosecutors in Manhattan to drop bribery charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. The stated justification for the demand had nothing to do with the evidence in the case and focused instead on politics.The actions on Monday stunned current and former prosecutors and investigators who said the department was abandoning a tradition of holding public officials, corporate executives and others accountable for corruption in favor of an approach built on political or economic expedience.That same day, Mr. Trump pardoned Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted in 2011 of essentially trying to sell a Senate seat that was vacated by President Barack Obama. Mr. Trump had previously commuted Mr. Blagojevich’s sentence.Trump administration officials have also ordered the shutdown of an initiative to seize assets owned by foreign kleptocrats, dialed back scrutiny of foreign influence efforts aimed at the United States and replaced the top career Justice Department official handling corruption cases.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bannon Pleads Guilty to Fraud in Border Wall Case but Will Serve No Time

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      President Trump had already pardoned his adviser in a similar federal case, which accused him of skimming money from donations to build a Southern border barrier.Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to President Trump, pleaded guilty on Tuesday in Manhattan criminal court to a single count of defrauding donors who sought to help build a wall at the Southern border.Mr. Bannon’s plea deal stipulates that he will be given a three-year conditional discharge, meaning he will receive no prison time if he does not reoffend.He had faced five felony counts, including money laundering and conspiracy charges, and faced a maximum sentence of five to 15 years on the most serious charge.This is a developing story and will be updated. More