Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter Readers. The first week of Donald Trump’s second term is in the books. The 47th president took office Monday afternoon, as the split screen of Joe Biden and Trump’s final hours for the first time cemented the politicians’ respective notions of justice through their clemency grants. And Trump’s new administration has fired its opening salvos on immigration and more, with legal challenges already brewing in court.
Biden went out in a burst of gracegranting pre-emptive clemency to potential Trump targets such as January 6 committee members and officers who testified before the committee. The outgoing president has also forgiven his family members out of fear of retaliation. And in a more typical kind of controversial last-minute move, the Democrat commuted the life sentence of 80-year-old Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who has maintained his innocence while serving time for the 1975 murders of two FBI agents. “This commutation will allow Mr. Peltier to spend his remaining days in House confinement, but will not pardon him for his underlying crimes,” Biden said.
Trump has forged his own pardon path Not long after Chief Justice John Roberts swore him in and Justice Brett Kavanaugh swore in Vice President J.D. Vance (Second Lady Usha Vance clerked for both GOP appointees). As he did four years ago, Trump pledged to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. Notably, the presidential oath did not require him to state “support” for the nation’s founding document. Last year, Trump’s lawyers highlighted the distinction in a lawsuit over his ballot measure to bolster his claim that he was not subject to the Constitution’s ban on oath-breaking insurrectionists.
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Of course, the Roberts Court Kept him on the ballot and he won the 2024 election. Assistance with the Court’s eligible voting and immunity rulings allowed Trump to avoid a trial — and thus possible punishment — over the alleged criminal plot to keep power despite losing the election of 2020. And his political victory allowed him to quickly pardon almost all those convicted January 6.
Pardon recipients include hundreds of people who attacked police, according to a fair security analysis. That means Trump’s Clemency decision did not trigger the distinction Vance made earlier this month when he said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Former officer Michael Fanone, who defended the Capitol on January 6, said on “Deadline: White House” that “the American people own this decision. You chose this. You chose this man to be president. And now you are responsible for this grace and the inevitable violence that will occur because these individuals and many more like them have been emboldened.”
Trump also ordered the Justice Department reject pending January 6. That led federal judges in Washington to rule against Trump’s claim that his blanket clemency ended a “grave national injustice” and began “a process of national reconciliation.” Judge Beryl Howell wrote that such reconciliation cannot happen “when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and does so with impunity.”
The January 6 Pardons weren’t just Trump Legal provocation in his first days back in office. They weren’t even his only grace. Signed as part of a slew of executive orders, his bid to undermine birthright citizenship was quickly halted in court. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee in Washington state, blocked the order for now, calling it “patently unconstitutional.” The judge, who has been on the bench for decades, said he could not recall “another case where the question presented is as clear as this one.” With this crucial constitutional question and others to come in this second Trump term, the test will be whether the Supreme Court agrees.
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This article was originally published on msnbc.com