Donald Trump just pardoned Robert Henry Harshbarger for healthcare fraud, simply because he’s the husband of a congresswoman who is a loyal Trump ally. But that kind of blatant political corruption gets second billing compared to even more corrupt pardons he issued for his own co-conspirators in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Politico reports:
The extraordinarily broad pardon, signed Friday but revealed Sunday night, has little substantive effect for its recipients. Trump can pardon only federal crimes, and his administration had already pulled the plug on any lingering investigations stemming from the 2020 election. Some of the clemency recipients are still facing state-level criminal charges in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — though some Trump allies argue the pardons could derail those cases.
The mass pardon — the first in history to cover people accused of criminally conspiring with the president who issued it — comes as Trump continues to stoke false claims about rampant cheating by Democrats and sow doubts about the integrity of future elections. And his opponents see the pardon as a permission slip for similar efforts in 2026 and 2028. …
Oyer said the pardon was written so broadly that it could apply to countless people who aided Trump’s effort to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election—and the vaguely worded document permits Martin and other Justice Department officials to decide for themselves who receives a pardon certificate.
“That’s just not how pardon paperwork is written,” Oyer said.
The move also appeared to be a way for Trump to test the well-settled boundaries of the pardon power itself, with allies like Martin and election attorney Cleta Mitchell suggesting it should cause the pending state cases to crumble. The pair argue that the presidential pardon could cover state-law crimes because the purported electors were engaged in activity related to a federal election, though legal scholars say that rationale is a stretch.
This is a multi-level abuse and distortion of the pardon power. First, Trump is pardoning his own co-conspirators. Second, this is an open-ended blanket pardon to a whole class of as-yet-unnamed people, not just specific individuals. And he is attempting, with no constitutional authority whatsoever, to extend his federal pardon power to bind the states.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.