President Donald Trump’s decision to offer presidential pardons to disgraced former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and 76 other people involved in the failed effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden is not as black and white as it might seem.
The move, sources tell The Independent, goes beyond merely protecting Trump loyalists from the federal government — to covertly pressure state courts, where the president has no power to issue pardons, into tossing out charges against some who still face prosecutions locally.
The late-Sunday-night pardons absolve Giuliani — the once-revered 9/11 “America’s Mayor” turned Trump layer —as well as fellow former Trump attorneys Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis, along with current Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn and the GOP activists who signed forged electoral college certificates of any federal criminal liability for any offenses they might have been charged with relating to the fake elector plot, which indirectly led to a riotous mob of the president’s supporters storming the U.S. Capitol in hopes of preventing certification of Trump’s loss.
But none of those pardoned are facing any federal charges stemming from the failed plot, and with Trump back in power and the five-year statute of limitations on any potential crimes set to expire in just under 10 weeks, none of them ever would have.
The Independent has learned that the announcement from Department of Justice pardon attorney Ed Martin — who was himself a leading figure in the “stop the steal” efforts — is part of a long-shot gambit to influence the state-level charges that have been brought against fake electors and some close Trump confidantes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.
According to a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity, the pardons that Martin unveiled were “circulating for months” between the White House, the DOJ, conservative scholars and other “interested parties” — including Trump himself — despite the fact that the president can’t prevent prosecutions at the state level.
“The President of the United States was actively involved in advancing this. And everyone understood that it was going to be everyone understood that it wasn't going to have that effect,” said the official.
Although Trump only faced state-level charges for attempting to overturn election results in Georgia — with that case on hold after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified for ethical violations last year — his allies turned co-defendants in that case and other cases could face serious consequences for what they did nearly five years ago.
In Wisconsin, Chesebro, Trump campaign operative Michael Roman and attorney Jim Troupis are facing a laundry list of felony charges for their alleged role in the forged electoral certificate plot.
In Arizona, 18 of the president’s allies are being prosecuted by Attorney General Kris Mayes, who obtained indictments from a grand jury that named Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator and mastermind of an alleged plot to steal the Grand Canyon State’s electoral votes. Among those facing charges are Giuliani, Trump’s ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows, his current personal attorney Boris Epshteyn, and ex-Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward.
That case, like the Georgia case, is on hold pending appeal after the presiding judge recused himself and replacement ruled that the case was flawed because the grand jury which voted on the indictments hadn’t been shown the 1887 Electoral Count Act.
Cases against fake electors are also ongoing in Michigan and Nevada, but proceedings have been slow and have faced multiple challenges.
Trump can’t stop the state courts from doing their work, but the DOJ source added that Trump and other advocates for the mass pardon of 2020 election figures are still hopeful that state courts that are hearing cases against his allies will view the pardons as a persuasive authority for the argument that the cases should be tossed out.
“The pardon has no effect on state charges, but functions as a very powerful amicus brief to say that to the extent that this is a case about a federal election, the federal government has said there is no case here, and we are completely absolving them,” they said.
Sunday’s announcement noted that the pardons were also extended to members of Trump’s administration and campaign uncovered in the January 6 investigations as having facilitated direct conversations between MAGAworld and a combination of conservative activists and sympathetic conservative state lawmakers who supported the president’s efforts, including Meadows.
A line near the end of the statement also pointedly indicated that one individual was not pardoned in connection with the scheme: Donald J. Trump.
Aside from directing the “fake elector” scheme, members of the 2020 Trump legal team named in the document participated in another, more orthodox method of challenging the 2020 election results. In multiple lawsuits led by Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and others on the campaign legal team, Trumpworld argued that widespread voter fraud had taken place in numerous states and had changed the results of the election in Biden’s favor.
The campaign was never able to provide definitive proof to any judge who took the cases, instead relying on signed affidavits from the president’s supporters, who alleged they had witnessed nefarious activity. Trump campaign sources never proved that the vote totals in any of the states they targeted had been manipulated, nor were they able to come up with measurable numbers of names of voters who had participated in the election unlawfully through fraudulent means.
Campaign sources were separately unable to prove that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two companies that supplied digital elections infrastructure to states during the 2020 election, had used systems that were manipulated or corrupted in any way. Those companies ended up launching massive legal bids against conservative news networks that uncritically spread the Trump campaign’s claims, such as Fox News. In Fox’s case, Dominion Voting Systems was awarded a staggering $787m settlement.
Giuliani, who was the public face of the Trump campaign’s legal team in 2020, fell into personal and professional disgrace over his actions. Appearing sloppy, confused, and downright inept at times as he presented the president’s case, Giuliani found himself disbarred in Washington, D.C. and New York after it was all said and done.
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