President Donald Trump pardoned 26 people along with three commutations before he left for Florida for Christmas.
The main three are Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Jared Kushner’s father Charles.
About Manafort:
“Today, President Trump has issued a full and complete pardon to Paul Manafort, stemming from convictions prosecuted in the course of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, which was premised on the Russian collusion hoax,” the White House said. “Mr. Manafort has already spent two years in prison, including a stretch of time in solitary confinement – treatment worse than what many of the most violent criminals receive. As a result of blatant prosecutorial overreach, Mr. Manafort has endured years of unfair treatment and is one of the most prominent victims of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American history.”
In 2018, Manafort ended up getting a jail sentence mostly on charges not affiliated with the Trump-Russia collusion case:
Manafort was convicted in Virginia in 2018 on five counts of tax fraud, one count of concealing his foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud while the judge declared a mistrial on 10 other charges. Manafort had also been charged in a separate case with failing to register as a foreign lobbyist, money laundering, making false statements to investigators, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and witness tampering, and he pleaded guilty to just the final two charges in Washington, D.C., a month and a half after his trial conviction.
Then in early 2019, Manafort received a 47-month prison sentence from Judge T.S. Ellis and 43 months from Judge Amy Berman.
Manafort left prison in May due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently under home confinement.
Manafort might still have some legal trouble in New York:
The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., charged Mr. Manafort with mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other state felonies in March 2019 in an effort to ensure that he would still face prosecution should Mr. Trump eventually pardon him. Presidential pardons only apply to federal, not state, laws.But in December of that year, a New York trial judge ruled that the indictment violated the state’s double jeopardy law, a decision that was upheld by an appeals court in October of this year.Mr. Vance’s office, which has sought leave to appeal that ruling to the state’s highest tribunal, the court of appeals, said in a statement Wednesday night that the president’s pardon of Mr. Manafort makes clear that the state charges should be upheld.
Trump already commuted Stone’s 40-month sentence after he was “convicted on seven counts of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House inquiry into possible Trump campaign coordination with Russia.”
A lot of people wondered if Trumo would take action on Kushner, the father of his son-in-law Jared.
In 2004, Kushner pled guilty “to 16 counts of tax evasion, a single count of retaliating against a federal witness and one of lying to the Federal Election Commission in a case that was also a lurid family drama.”
Kushner left prison in 2006. But the “family drama” is pretty gross:
The witness he was accused of retaliating against was his brother-in-law, who along with his wife, Mr. Kushner’s sister, was cooperating with federal officials in a campaign finance investigation into Mr. Kushner.In his plea agreement, Mr. Kushner acknowledged that he arranged to have a prostitute seduce his brother-in-law in a motel room in New Jersey where video cameras were installed. Mr. Kushner then had the videotape sent to his sister.
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