Trump's war on juries
Jurors are being told that their careful work doesn't matter.
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It’s no secret that President Donald Trump doesn’t really believe in the justice system. For him, it serves only two purposes: protecting himself and hurting others. He doesn’t feel the least bit bound by orders or outcomes, but he isn’t just at war with judges.
He’s also at war with juries.
By now, everyone is familiar with Trump and the Department of Justice’s manipulation of grand juries to obtain felony indictments that fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. (Looking at you, US Attorney for the District of Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro.) Trump and the DOJ also have no problem misusing grand juries in an attempt to prosecute the innocent. (Looking at you, one-time Interim US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan.)
But when it comes to trial juries, Trump’s disdain manifests in exactly the opposite fashion. Convictions are tossed, regardless of what happened at trial, regardless of the careful work of juries. He’s making it extremely clear that views himself as judge, jury, and executioner.
Now, the president isn’t foreclosed from pardoning someone just because a jury of their peers weighed in and found them guilty. But we’ve never had one who decided to traipse through past convictions, discarding things based on personal whims and opportunities for profit, with no real justification.
In Donald Trump’s America, if you’re rich enough or corrupt enough, jury decisions simply don’t matter. Pardons are for sale and used to send a message that juries shouldn’t convict people of crimes that the president himself has committed.
This has, predictably, led to results that are both terrible and stupid from the standpoint of the rule of law.
Take Trevor Milton.
Scams upon scams
Milton started an electric vehicle company, Nikola, that was basically a scam from the jump. He claimed he was making hydrogen-powered trucks and investors threw tons of money at him to do it. But he wasn’t making anything of the sort, particularly because he was selling a technology that doesn’t really exist.
To cover that up, Milton pulled stunts like rolling a nonfunctioning semi truck down a hill to make it appear like it was successfully trundling along a desert highway.
Milton was convicted by a jury in 2022 after a trial that lasted nearly a month and later sentenced to four years in prison. He was also ordered to pay restitution of around $680 million to investors he duped and an additional $15 million to one of his wire fraud victims.
But Milton managed to get quite a bargain by donating about $1.8 million to Trump’s campaign in October 2024. That didn’t just buy him a pardon and get him out from under a criminal conviction — it also wiped out that extremely expensive restitution. And Trump did Milton another solid by killing a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.
For Trump, saving Milton close to $700 million didn’t even merit a mention. Instead, he invented a world where what Milton was really prosecuted for was supporting one Donald J. Trump: “They say the thing that he did wrong was, he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. He supported Trump. He liked Trump. I didn’t know him, but he liked him. They persecuted him, they destroyed five years of his life.”
This fiction requires a lot of heavy lifting, even by Trump standards.
The insistence that Milton was persecuted because he supported Trump necessitates believing the jury that convicted him was either manipulated by evil prosecutors for a full month or that they, too, were in on the persecution. And what of all the victims of Milton’s fraud? Were they all just lying? Did an entire class of investors hate Trump so much they joined up with Joe Biden’s DOJ to demand millions from Milton? Did Milton really make a working hydrogen truck only to get sucker-punched by prosecutors eager to land a blow against Trump?
This isn’t to say that federal prosecutors never bring spurious charges or inflate the wrongdoing of defendants or deceive juries. But neither Trump nor Milton is really claiming that. In their telling, his conviction is just part of some vast anti-Trump conspiracy and therefore Milton, by definition, did no wrong. Milton’s explanation of his pardon even echoes Trump’s belief that he alone is the law: “The presidential pardon and dismissal of the SEC case demonstrate no laws were broken or violated.”
This is, obviously, not what a pardon means at all. A presidential pardon doesn’t magically mean Milton didn’t break the law. It just means he is going to suffer zero consequences for doing so.
Trump also doesn’t care about juries when he wants to reward some semi-famous reality TV people who are also scammy criminals, because like finds like.
So, he made sure to pardon Todd and Julie Chrisley of “Chrisley Knows Best” after a jury found them guilty following a multi-week trial in 2022. According to one of the Chrisleys’ attorneys, they were “prosecuted because they were celebrities” and “were treated more harshly because of their status, and that’s not the way our criminal justice system is supposed to work.”
Besides the fact that Trump’s pardon requires us to swallow the laughable lie that the American justice system is famously hard on celebrities, it also requires us to ignore that the initial indictment against Trump’s TV pals occurred in August 2019, during his first term.
The Chrisleys were charged with conspiracy, bank fraud, and wire fraud for spending 2007 to 2012 submitting fake bank statements and other financial documents to banks to get millions in loans.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s pretty similar to what Trump and his companies were found liable for in a civil fraud case in New York state. There, Trump also spent years giving banks and lenders financial statements that overstated his wealth so he could get more favorable loan terms.
Trump was outraged that a case was ever brought against him in the first place, even though the New York state appellate court inexplicably wiped out his massive fine. It didn’t, however, get rid of the underlying finding that Trump had engaged in fraud, and he continues to try to get the verdict tossed out entirely because he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with scamming banks in that fashion.
The Chrisleys reacted to their good fortune the same way Milton did: Not by being grateful for mercy, but by deciding that Trump’s pardon magically means they never broke the law. So, they’re now suing their criminal attorneys for $25 million for losing the case.
But wait, there’s more! Not only does it appear the Chrisleys no longer have to pay any more of the $17 million in restitution they were ordered to pay back to the banks they defrauded, but they also may be able to claw back whatever they already paid.
Another way Trump has shown his profound contempt for juries is that he’s willing to grant clemency to a fellow fraudster twice, once in each term.
Meet Adriana Camberos.
Camberos was convicted in 2016 for selling counterfeit 5-Hour Energy drinks, which sounds like no big deal until you learn it involved millions of bottles that were mixed in unsanitary conditions. Trump commuted her sentence in 2021, at which point she went on to do more crimes.
In 2024, Camberos was convicted of bank and mail fraud, funding her big-spending lifestyle with a new scam. This time, she purchased wholesale groceries at discounted prices, promising to sell them to needy people. Instead, she marked the groceries up and sold them to distributors. Trump pardoned her again earlier this year.
Rubbing our faces in it
The pardons of Milton, the Chrisleys, and Camberos aren’t about mercy, They’re about permission. And it’s no coincidence that those people Trump seems most inclined to rescue from the consequences of their own actions are the same things he himself has done.
Past presidents, of course, have also handed out pardons as a sort of reward or a sort of shield — think Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, a financier whose wife was a big donor to the Democratic Party — but nobody has come anywhere close to Trump’s abuse of them.
While Republicans been perfectly happy to let Trump turn the pardon power into a treat machine, back when Barack Obama was president they thought pardons were bad because Obama dared to commute the sentences of people convicted of drug-related crimes. According to Republicans back then, Obama was engaged in a “blatant usurpation of the lawmaking authority of the Legislative branch” and an “unconstitutional practice of picking and choosing which laws to enforce and which to change.”
Hmmm. Republicans seem to have gotten over worrying about whether the pardon authority infringed on their lawmaking, as Trump’s stance is that any law he doesn’t like is, by definition, not one his pals should be convicted of.
Biden took a ton of heat for his preemptive pardons, but he absolutely wasn’t wrong to try to protect people from the vindictiveness of Trump once he retook office.
That was confirmed recently when rabid Senate Republicans voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt for exercising his Constitutional right to plead the Fifth Amendment, as they are desperate to find something that would count as a new “crime” that wouldn’t be covered by Biden’s pardon.
Even Trump’s mass pardon of his January 6 insurrectionists isn’t akin to previous mass pardons. Jimmy Carter didn’t mass pardon people convicted of dodging the Vietnam War draft because the draft-dodger contingent had supported him in some violent fashion and he wanted to reward them. He didn’t mass pardon those folks because he himself dodged the draft — unlike Trump, who actually did. But Trump’s pardon of J6ers was both a gift to his treasonous supporters and a way of conveying that a violent insurrection in service of blocking the peaceful transfer of power is no big deal and you can’t be charged for it.
Trump has been running what can only be described as a pay-to-play presidency from the jump. If Congress were willing to do its job, it’s not as if they could reverse the pardons, but they could at least illuminate just how bad his actions are. Instead, the GOP is sitting on its hands, willing to let Trump make a mockery of both the pardon power and those who serve on juries.
It really isn’t surprising that Trump would think people fulfilling their civic duty are either suckers or part of some vast conspiracy to bring him and his rich pals down. And with every pardon and every transparent and risible lie about them, he sends a message that the rule of law simply doesn’t matter at all.
Programming note
Due to travel Aaron is doing this week, there will be no PN Pod this week. The show will return next Friday, August 21.
That’s it for today
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Christopher Armitage frequently points out the only workable alternative: prosecute under an analogous state statute instead of federal law. Trump can't pardon people for state violations. He can find ways to pressure a state to issue a pardon, but states can resist those - and make a lot of noise about it, further lowering Trump's popularity.
There are state statutes that cover fraud, deception, and financial crimes, like the laws that cover Trump's New York State conviction. For now, prosecutors will have to prosecute anyone wealthy enough to buy a pardon under state law.
There is no end to the corruption. I became more curious about the abuse of pardons, and found an entire Wikipedia page devoted to it. Ugh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executive_clemency_in_the_second_Trump_presidency