Trump has granted clemency to more than 1,800 people – and some have been arrested again

Among the beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s pardons and commutations, there is a group that legal experts and political scientists see as some of the clearest evidence of how such actions undermine the rule of law: those who were released from prison and again arrested for different alleged crimes.

During his first term, Trump issued 237 acts of clemency – including to someone who was a predatory lender and drug smuggler and to another who ran a Ponzi scheme. Since taking office again, Trump has issued more than 1,600, most for people involved in the January 6 attack on Congress.

At least a dozen of the people Trump has granted clemency to since 2016 were arrested for separate crimes after January 6.

That should come as no surprise, experts say, because Trump did not follow the usual review process for considering such pardons, making it more likely that those people had already committed other crimes or took the clemency as an indication that they did not do anything wrong.

“What else would you expect?” Susan Benesch, a human rights lawyer and director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said of the recidivism. “People have been pardoned in the past after they expressed remorse or served a lot of time or credibly expressed that they were sorry and wish they hadn’t committed the crime – or both.”

But in these cases, “the president seems to be indicating to them that it was fine to do what they did”, Benesch said.

The framers of the US constitution gave the president only one unchecked, unilateral power: the ability to issue pardons and reprieves, said Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

“That was based on the assumption that presidents would exercise discretion and judgment on behalf of the public interest,” Rozell noted.

Despite that freedom, Rozell said presidents have traditionally relied on a justice department manual, which detailed criteria to use when considering pardons and commutations, and asked the office of the pardon attorney to review petitions for clemency.

“These things have been considered oftentimes over a very extended period of time,” he said.

That does not mean that all presidents before Trump issued pardons to serve the public good. On his last day in office, Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a commodities trader who fled the country after being accused of evading taxes and illegally trading with Iran in oil. His ex-wife had donated to Democrats and the Clinton presidential library.

Joe Biden also went back on his word and pardoned his son Hunter Biden after he was convicted of lying on a gun license application and tax evasion, prompting criticism from both Democrats and Republicans.

Still, experts say the pardons issued by Trump are different in scale.

“The significance of the accusations and offenses for which people have been convicted were not at all the same as Hunter Biden,” said Karen Hult, political science professor at Virginia Tech University.

Before Trump started his second term, incoming vice-president JD Vance said of those who committed violence on 6 January 2021: “Obviously, you should not be pardoned.”

But then the president reportedly lost patience during the review process and said, “Fuck it: release ’em all,” according to Axios. He issued pardons or commutations for 1,500 people on his first day in office.

At least 10 of the rioters have been arrested for other crimes since the US Capitol attack.

Andrew Taake assailed police with bear spray and a metal whip on January 6, while on bail from charges for going online and soliciting a person he thought was younger than 17. After the pardon, he spent two weeks as a fugitive before police arrested him. He pleaded guilty to online solicitation of a minor and was sentenced to three years in prison. Due to prison-time “credit” he accrued after attacking the officer, he did not serve time, the Daily Beast reported.

Edward Kelley, one of the first rioters to breach the US Capitol, was sentenced to life in prison for plotting to attack an FBI officer and assassinate law enforcement officers who investigated his actions on January 6. Daniel Ball was accused of throwing an explosive device into the Lower West Terrace tunnel on January 6, which reportedly disoriented police officers and caused hearing loss. After the pardon, he was arrested on federal gun charges because prosecutors argued that his convictions, including domestic violence battery by strangulation and resisting law enforcement, legally prohibited him from possessing firearms.

David Daniel pleaded guilty to assaulting or resisting a police officer on January 6. He was arrested in September 2024 with possession of child pornography and sexual exploitation of a minor. He is now seeking a second pardon, using the argument successfully made by another rioter that he should be re-pardoned because the evidence in the other crime was discovered during an FBI search concerning the Capitol attack, Politico reported.

Theodore Middendorf pleaded guilty to destruction of government property on January 6. He was sentenced in 2024 to 19 years in prison for sexually assaulting a seven-year-old and remains in prison, according to National Public Radio. Brent Holdridge was sentenced to 60 days in jail on a misdemeanor charge stemming from January 6. He was arrested again in May 2025 in connection with a string of alleged thefts of industrial copper, the New York Times reported.

Zachary Alam was sentenced to eight years in prison for eight felonies, including assaulting law enforcement on January 6. Alam did not express remorse for his actions, and a judge described him as “by far the loudest, the most combative and the most violent of the rioters”. He was again arrested in May for burglary and vandalism.

Rozell said that clemency and, in some cases, subsequent crimes could have been avoided had the office of the pardon attorney, George Mason, reviewed their cases.

“The whole point of having the office of the pardon attorney review these cases is to avoid such circumstances where you have someone who has a propensity to be a repeat offender,” he said.

The US Capitol rioters are not the only people Trump pardoned who then continued to harm others. In 2019, Jonathan Braun was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to drug-related charges. Trump commuted his sentence just before leaving office during his first term.

Braun, who had also been fined $20m for predatory lending, was sent back to prison in November for violating the terms of his release by, among other things, swinging an IV pole at a nurse and threatening to kill her and groping his family’s nanny.

Also in November, Eliyahu Weinstein was sentenced to 37 years for defrauding investors out of $35m. During his first term, Trump commuted Weinstein’s sentence for a Ponzi scheme and additional fraud he committed while on pretrial release, which resulted in combined losses to investors of approximately $230m. Trump did so after lobbying from Republican lawmakers, former US attorneys and attorney Alan Dershowitz, who represented the president during his impeachment trial.

“Before I pardoned someone like that, I would really want some convincing evidence that he had changed his longstanding habit of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from people,” said Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project.

Otherwise, such pardons serve as a “wink and a nod and a sign to do it again”.