Biden grants clemency for nearly 1,500 people, the biggest single-day act of clemency in modern history
President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he is commuting the sentences of some 1,500 individuals and pardoning 39 people convicted of non-violent crimes – marking a broad use of the presidential clemency power just weeks from the end of Biden’s administration.
White House officials are billing Thursday’s move as the biggest single-day act of clemency in modern history. The president, who has come under growing pressure to grant more clemencies before he leaves office and who controversially granted a pardon to his son Hunter earlier this month, also promised that additional action will be announced in the weeks to come.
“America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances,” Biden said in a statement released shortly after CNN reported early Thursday morning on the coming announcement. “As President, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities, and taking steps to remove sentencing disparities for non-violent offenders, especially those convicted of drug offenses.”
The nearly 1,500 individuals whose long sentences are being commuted Thursday were placed on home confinement during the Covid-19 pandemic, and were deemed to have demonstrated a clear commitment to rehabilitation and reintegration into their communities, sources said. The 39 people being pardoned were convicted of non-violent crimes, and considered to have demonstrated records of meaningfully giving back to the country.
“They are individuals who have secured employment, advanced their education, served as caretakers for their children and family members, and have really reintegrated into the tapestry of their communities,” an administration official familiar with the announcement told CNN. “They include individuals who faced incredible challenges in life and have really now shown resilience and seeking to overcome those challenges.”
While CNN has not obtained a full list of names of the clemency recipients, sources provided several examples of individuals being pardoned.
Among them: A decorated military veteran described as having devoted much of his time helping members of his community including the sick and elderly; a nurse who is said to have helped during natural disasters and was at the forefront of vaccination efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic; as well as an addiction counselor recognized for his dedication to mentoring young men of color.
Thursday’s announcement is expected to be widely celebrated by human rights activities, advocacy groups, Democratic lawmakers and the families of those receiving the commutations and pardons.
As the president’s first term approaches its end, calls for Biden to more aggressively and widely exercise his clemency power before incoming president Donald Trump takes office have only grown louder – including by taking several dozen inmates off of federal death row. (Biden has publicly opposed capital punishment.)
Biden has previously pardoned military veterans convicted of having gay sex – formerly a crime under military law – and also issued pardons to those convicted of marijuana possession.
The historic announcement came after intense advocacy from criminal justice and civil rights groups. Their contacts with the White House picked up before November, “to figure out what a post-election clemency effort might look like,” according to a senior official from a pro-clemency group that has been lobbying the Biden administration.
These meetings often involved the White House Counsel’s office and the Domestic Policy Council. White House staffers were “receptive” to this outreach, which largely came from liberal-leaning groups that have aligned with the administration, but staffers didn’t tip their hand about how far the president was planning to go, the official said.
Biden’s announcement broke some previous records set by former President Barack Obama, who issued a spate of pardons and commutations before leaving office in 2017.
But some still want more from Biden. The official from the advocacy group said they were “pleasantly surprised” by Biden’s latest commutations – but noted that this latest round of clemency won’t actually free all that many people from living behind bars.
“These people were already home,” the official said, referring to the 1,500 people who got commutations Thursday, who were already on house arrest after being released from prison amid the Covid-19 pandemic. “We are hoping for more commutations that will actually bring people home from prison, and shorten some very lengthy sentences.”
Thursday’s news comes on the heels of Biden’s decision to issue a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter after repeatedly insisting over the course of several months that he would not do so. The move sparked an uproar, including among some of the president’s allies and fellow Democrats who questioned his decision to renege on his word.
Anita Dunn, a former senior adviser to the president, said last week that the move struck her as “exceptionally poor timing.”
Biden’s pardoning of his son, the administration official insisted, has not shaped his thinking on the use of his clemency power overall.
“The President has shown his views on clemency and how he can use the clemency power to make our country more equitable, more just, repair some of the past wrongdoings that we’ve seen in the criminal justice system, and that continues to be how the president is viewing the petitions that he is and will be reviewing over the coming weeks,” they said.
With less than six weeks left until the end of Biden’s term, the president is expected to provide further relief.
“I will take more steps in the weeks ahead,” Biden said. “My Administration will continue reviewing clemency petitions to advance equal justice under the law, promote public safety, support rehabilitation and reentry, and provide meaningful second chances.”
The president has been consulting with White House Counsel Ed Siskel and the lawyers at the counsel’s office about a range of clemency options, sources said. The White House counsel’s office has also been in consultation with the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
Victims ‘shocked’ after Biden grants clemency to ‘kids-for-cash’ judge and $54 million embezzler
Victims of major public corruption cases in Pennsylvania and Illinois are angry that President Joe Biden granted clemency this week to two convicted officials.
The commutations were announced Thursday as part of a historic clemency package for 1,500 convicted criminals who, the White House said, “deserve a second chance.”
The two convicted officials whose cases sparked outrage – a crooked Pennsylvania judge and a notorious Illinois fraudster – both had already been released from prison early and put on house arrest during the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden’s actions now end that punishment.
The president has already faced bipartisan criticism over his highly controversial pardon of his son Hunter Biden, who was convicted earlier this year of 12 tax and gun crimes.
A Biden administration official told CNN the latest commutations were not individual decisions and instead it was a uniform decision granted to people who met certain criteria, like having a track record of good behavior while on house arrest.
‘Got it absolutely wrong’
Former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan was convicted in 2011 in what was infamously called the “kids-for-cash” scandal, where he took kickbacks from for-profit detention centers in exchange for wrongly sending juveniles to their facilities. The case was widely considered to be one of the worst judicial scandals in Pennsylvania history.
Like all of the other nearly 1,500 people who got commutations from Biden this week, Conahan was freed from prison due to Covid. His house arrest was set to end in 2026.
The misconduct of Conahan and another Luzerne County judge led the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to throw out 4,000 juvenile convictions, and the discredited state judges were ordered to pay $200 million to the victims, according to the Associated Press.
Sandy Fonzo – the mother of Edward Kenzakoski, who died by suicide after spending time behind bars as part of the kickback scheme – said she was “shocked… and hurt” after learning of Biden’s decision to commute the rest of Conahan’s punishment.
“Conahan‘s actions destroyed families, including mine, and my son‘s death is a tragic reminder of the consequences of his abuse of power,” Fonzo told the Citizens’ Voice, a local outlet. “This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer. Right now I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, also said Friday at an unrelated news conference in Biden’s hometown of Scranton that, “I do feel strongly that President Biden got it absolutely wrong and created a lot of pain here in northeastern Pennsylvania.”
‘Justice wasn’t served’
There was similar fallout in Illinois, after Biden gave clemency to Rita Crundwell, the former comptroller of Dixon, a city of roughly 15,000 in the northern part of the state.
She pleaded guilty in 2012 to a $54 million embezzlement scheme, which was believed to be the largest municipal fraud in US history. She was sentenced to almost 20 years in prison, nearly the maximum, though she moved to house arrest during the pandemic.
She was supposed to be on house arrest until 2028, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
“When I heard the news, I was completely shocked in disbelief, I was outraged and felt a complete sense of betrayal from the federal justice system, the White House and the president,” Dixon city manager Danny Langloss told CNN in an interview on Friday.
Langloss, who said he doesn’t affiliate with a political party, was the police chief when Crundwell’s fraud was uncovered. He said he believes “justice wasn’t served here.”
“I don’t like the idea … that with several more years of her sentence to complete, she gets to walk free in the community that she betrayed and stole from,” Langloss said.
Fallout from the pandemic
Margaret Love, who served in the Justice Department as the US pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, said the fallout from Biden’s latest commutations was a consequence of how the prison population was reduced during Covid – under the Trump administration.
Congress passed the bipartisan CARES Act in March 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, which, among other things, paved the way for the federal government to move about 12,000 inmates from federal prisons into home confinement. Many of these people have since completed their sentences, though plenty remain on house arrest.
“Many people who were sent home were convicted of white-collar or nonviolent offenses and were considered safe bets to behave in the community,” Love said, adding that she believed the decision-making was tainted by racial discrimination.
With grumblings among some Republicans about sending these convicts back to prison, Love said Biden “simply cleaned out this population” and took that option off the table.
And to those upset that Biden let these criminals out of house arrest early, “you should have complained four years ago when they were released from prison,” Love said.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Former top Biden aide slams Hunter Biden pardon rollout strategy
One of President Joe Biden’s former top communications advisers ravaged the president’s messaging rollout strategy around his decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, lambasting the situation as “exceptionally poor timing” in a major public rebuke of her former boss.
“In the middle of a Kash Patel weekend, kind of throwing this into the middle of it was exceptionally poor timing and … the argument is one that I think many observers are concerned about: A president who ran to restore the rule of law, who has upheld the rule of law, who has really defended the rule of law kind of saying, ‘Well, maybe not right now,’” former senior Biden adviser Anita Dunn said in a panel discussion with CNN contributor and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, which posted online Wednesday.
Dunn was a deeply loyal aide with a big-picture view of Biden’s strategy – with a hand in nearly all aspects of his political life. In the days after Biden announced his decision to step down from his 2024 candidacy, a decision kept to a tight circle of aides that she learned of moments before Biden announced it to the world, Dunn departed the White House for a super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris.
During the December 4 New York Times DealBook Summit event, Dunn underscored the criticism Biden has faced from members of his own party that his justification of the pardon of his son undercut faith in the US judicial system.
“I do not agree with the way it was done, I don’t agree with the timing, and I don’t agree, frankly, with the attack on our judicial system,” she said, later reiterating that she disagreed on “the timing, the argument, and sort of, the rationale.”
Dunn suggested that the decision and messaging was coordinated by the Biden family and Hunter Biden’s defense team. The president has said he made the decision over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend while with family in Nantucket.
“The White House was really not part of this process. It was a process that was done very much internally with the family and with the defense lawyers,” she said.
A new CNN/SSRS poll released on Wednesday shows that just one-third of Americans (32%) approve of the president’s decision to pardon his son, while 68% disapprove.
The White House has defended Biden’s decision, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre arguing that President-elect Donald Trump would not slow down in pursuit of bringing charges against Hunter Biden in the future.
“I think he truly believed enough is enough. This is, this is we have seen in last five years or so, the president’s political opponents say this– not even, I mean, this is not the president saying it, they said it themselves, they were going after Hunter Biden, and so he made this decision,” Jean-Pierre said on December 2.
‘Trump’s gonna pardon me anyways,’ January 6 rioter scoffs as he’s led from court to prison
A January 6 defendant on Friday taunted a federal judge’s decision to send him immediately to prison for one year for his role in the US Capitol riot, shouting as he was being handcuffed that President-elect Donald Trump would pardon him.
The rioter, Philip Sean Grillo of New York City, announced after his sentencing, “Trump’s gonna pardon me anyways,” as a US marshal had him remove his belt and tie before handcuffing him inside the courtroom.
Senior Judge Royce Lamberth of the DC District Court spoke about the judiciary’s role in bringing justice to hundreds of Capitol rioters who have faced criminal charges over the past four years. On Trump’s pledge to pardon them, Lamberth said he “has nothing to say about that decision.”
“I will do my job as I’m bound by oath to do, and the president will do his. It’s as simple as that,” the judge told the courtroom. He added that the delivery of justice was worth the effort, “no matter the political winds of the day.”
It is exceedingly rare for a judge to order a criminal defendant who is a nonviolent offender like Grillo to be taken into custody immediately at his sentencing. Lamberth’s courtroom on Friday provided an astonishing glimpse into the state of the January 6 prosecutions, as federal judges continue to sentence defendants even as Trump has promised to free them when he returns to the White House.
Lamberth gave little explanation for his reasoning for the immediate remand, remarking only he was ordering it because of “where we are in the process.”
“It falls to this court to hold him accountable. So now, bound by my oath of office and my allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, that is what I will do,” Lamberth said before delivering the sentence.
The court record shows Grillo had been drinking on January 6, 2021, spent significant time inside the Capitol building, and is on video yelling “charge” into a megaphone among the mob. He had expressed little remorse in court for his actions until Friday, when he told the judge he didn’t recognize the person on video four years ago.
Lamberth sentenced him to a year of supervised release following a year in prison. Grillo’s crimes, which a jury found him guilty of at trial, included entering a restricted federal building and behaving with disruptive conduct on the restricted grounds of the Capitol.
“I’m mortified,” Grillo told the judge during his sentencing. “I wish I never went.”
The judge spent 30 minutes at the conclusion of the sentencing hearing excoriating how Capitol rioters, their supporters and Trump himself have downplayed the violence of that day in 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters overran the Capitol. Lamberth also spoke extensively about his role as a federal judge to facilitate the discovery of facts, apply the law and carry out justice.
“They invaded the very nerve center of our republic during the performance of one of its most important functions: certifying the results of the presidential election,” Lamberth said. “Even nonviolent defendants merit punishment.”
Grillo’s defense attorney asked Lamberth to give Grillo a day to turn himself in voluntarily, and Lamberth said no.
Two friends of Grillo in the courtroom, who said they were Republican Party leaders in the Bronx and Queens, New York, loudly remarked after the sentencing that they were in touch with Trump’s transition team about the promised pardons, and that Grillo would be pardoned.
“Don’t worry, Phil,” one of the friends shouted immediately after Lamberth left the courtroom. The man declined to say who on Trump’s team he had spoken with.
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