The US president has the absolute right to grant pardons. But Donald Trump’s spree of pardons for loyalists and business allies has raised not only political eyebrows but also legal questions about abuse of power.

Since he began his second term in January, Trump “has begun to expand the pardon power both in nature and in scale”, said Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker . He has issued nearly 2,000 presidential pardons and commutations, compared to 238 in his first term.

On his very first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned hundreds of people charged with and convicted of storming the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Last month, he pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and dozens of others accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election. “More than any previous presid

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