In some ways yes and in some ways no, referencing the recent bombshell Wall Street Journal story about investments from Abu Dhabi into the Trump family business just before he became president for a second time. If the name were Biden instead of Trump, people would be screaming bloody murder, Shapiro said, before adding that he's confident that the president will likely pardon himself and his children in the same way that [former President] Joe Biden did on his way out.
Two days after his second inauguration, one of Donald Trump's first actions of his second presidency was to pardon nearly two dozen anti-abortion extremists, who had violently and illegally barricaded reproductive rights clinics, in some cases injuring staff and patients in the process, and in others, stealing aborted embryos and fetal tissue. At the time, Center for Reproductive Rights President Nancy Northrup told Jezebel the pardons were a "get-out-of-jail-free card inviting anti-abortion extremists to step up their attacks on reproductive health clinics with impunity."
These are not highly sophisticated, he told Loeffler. Yet the investigations go in perpetuity for years Hey, look, cut it off and see who yells and screams. Then we can go figure out where the problems are. But for the ones that have been going on for years, there's got to be an acceleration to say, Yeah, Monday, new year, new leaf. We're going to take care of business that, quite frankly, we should've taken care of last year.
Bill Maher pressed Lara Trump on her father-in-law's pardons for his pals and the weaponization of the DOJ in a tense interview moment. In the latest episode of his Club Random podcast that dropped Monday, Maher grilled Lara Trump, Eric Trump's wife, on many separate topics including controversial pardons and the president's use of the word piggy to describe a reporter.
The replacements came after online commenters seized on striking similarities in the president's signature across a series of pardons dated Nov. 7, including those granted to former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon. In fact, the signatures on several pardons initially uploaded to the Justice Department's website were identical, two forensic document experts confirmed to The Associated Press.
In mid-October, Trump commuted the prison sentence of Santos, the disgraced New York Republican who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft last year. Days later the president handed a full and unconditional pardon to Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of Binance, who pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. Binance has ties to the Trump family's cryptocurrency business, but Trump said in an interview with 60 Minutes that he does not know who Zhao is.
Right Sara, so this is a presidential pardon, so it only impacts federal criminal cases. So, as you said, several of these people are currently being prosecuted at the state level relating to the fake electors scheme in Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona. So the pardons have no impact on those state prosecutions. Now it's worth noting, those state prosecutions are largely in the process of collapsing or have collapsed in their own right, but the pardon has no impact.
