Trump issues pardons for Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell and others involved in 2020 fake elector scheme
The White House announced late Sunday evening that Donald Trump had issued pardons for members of his 2020 campaign legal team including Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and Sydney Powell, among others, for their involvement in a scheme to alter the slates of electors chosen by states that voted against Trump in that year’s presidential election.
A statement announcing a list of 77 people who were pardoned was tweeted out late Sunday evening, at 10:54 p.m. local time, by Trump’s “clemency czar” Ed Martin. It included a number of Americans who participated directly as members of the slates of false electors, whose purpose was to supplant duly-elected state electors bound to cast their states votes in the Electoral College for Joe Biden, after Biden won states including Georgia, Arizona and Michigan in the general election.
That plot, supported at the highest levels by Trump and his allies, eventually led to the effort by Trump’s supporters to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2021 — a political demonstration that devovled into a riot that attacked the U.S. Capitol and besieged it for several hours as Trump’s fans battled police.
Sunday’s announcement noted that the pardons were also extended to members of Donald Trump’s administration and campaign who were uncovered in the January 6 investigations as having facilitated those conversations directly between MAGAworld and the combination of conservative activists and sympathetic conservative state lawmakers who supported Trump’s efforts, including the president’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
A line near the end of the statement also pointedly indicated that one individual was not pardoned over the scheme: Donald J. Trump.
The timing of the announcement seemed as if it was meant to bury itself in a news cycle around the government shutdown. Just minutes earlier, the last vote was cast in the Senate to break a filibuster on a resolution to end a 40-day government shutdown by Sen. John Cornyn, who arrived late to vote. The resolution now heads to the House of Representatives, and potentially to the president’s desk for a signature that would end the longest funding lapse in history.
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