The entrance to the west wing of the White House, where the Oval Office is, this Monday.Leigh Vogel / POOL / EFE
President Donald Trump finalizes a new battery of pardons that he plans to announce this Tuesday, his last day in the White House, according to sources close to the Republican cited by several US media, and who collect the details of a meeting held on Sunday at the residence President to draft the final list.
According to the television network
CNN
, the outgoing president, who has already forgiven several people around him in recent months, had planned to space the announcements of his latest measures of grace, but the assault on the Capitol would have forced him to concentrate all the pardons and commutations of sentences, about a hundred in total, in the same batch.
Among the beneficiaries of the clemency are several "white collar criminals" and known rappers, according to the same source.
The power to pardon is the last power he has left as president and, apart from the legal exoneration it entails, it is also interpreted in terms of a message about the need to reform the penal code and as a nod to political allies, according to the chain television.
That is to say, Trump would use his powers as head of state until the last minute to amend the bill for judges and juries and benefit his allies with a justice tailored to his needs.
It does not seem that Trump himself will appear in the package of graceful ones, as he himself had dropped in recent weeks in one of his usual probe balloons.
If he self-pardoned, the Republican had stressed, he would do so as a preventive measure, to avoid processes once he was returned to his status as a citizen.
But the firepower of the
impeachment
approved last week by Congress - the second impeachment he faces - has momentarily left the processing of other cases in the air, as well as his own pardon.
Other members of his family, including his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, very active in foreign policy, as well as his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, would also appear in the presidential self-indult.
His advisers do not believe, however, that he will take the step, because it would imply the assumption of manifest guilt.
If Trump listens to his advisers and advisers, the batch of pardons that he will present this Tuesday will probably be left out of individuals who participated in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, during the confirmation session of Joe Biden's electoral victory.
In turn,
The New York Times newspaper
points out the possibility that the Republican was marketing or negotiating with the beneficiaries of the pardon, who would have given tens of thousands of dollars - if not more - to his collaborators as a way to guarantee an option. to pardon.
The newspaper bases its information on interviews and documents with at least three dozen lobbyists and attorneys for suspected criminals, including the son of a former Arkansas governor, the creator of an
online
drug
store
or a representative of Manhattan's high society. convicted of fraud.
Already at the beginning of December it was learned that justice was investigating an alleged network of bribery to soften Trump's magnanimity.
Those implicated, none of them identified because the documents are classified, would have promised "substantial political contributions" in exchange for a presidential pardon or a postponement of the sentences.
Trump accelerated the pace of pardons in the weeks leading up to Christmas, when he pardoned nearly 50 people in just over 24 hours, including two convicted in the Russian plot and four Blackwater contractors guilty of a massacre of civilians in Baghdad in 2007, plus three former Republican congressmen convicted of corruption.
But the heavyweights of the macroindult were Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager;
his friend and former adviser Roger Stone, sentenced to three years in prison for lying to Congress in the investigation of the Russian plot, and Charles Kushner, his father-in-law, guilty of tax evasion and illegal financing of the Republican campaign.
A month earlier, in November, he had pardoned former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, convicted of lying twice to the FBI during the investigation of the Russian plot.
In total, Trump has pardoned four prominent representatives of the scandal of alleged ties to Russia from his 2016 campaign, a process that the outgoing president has always described as a "witch hunt."
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