President Donald Trump attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House on December 2, 2025. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

President Donald Trump is taking an increasingly personal role in the government’s clemency process, wielding pardons with historic frequency to aid allies and advance his own political grievances.

The pardon actions have come so abruptly in certain cases that they surprised even some of those close to the president — such as a trio of recent clemency grants to a Democratic congressman, an executive charged by Trump’s own Justice Department and a former Honduran president convicted of drug-trafficking crimes.

Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,600 people this year, including hundreds who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as a rang

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