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Late last month, Jonathan Braun was arrested on allegations of shoving a 3-year-old, “causing a red mark on his back and substantial pain.” This is only his latest brush with the law over the past four years. He was banned by federal and New York State judges from working in debt collection; fined $20 million; and accused of punching his wife and father-in-law, groping a nanny, and attacking a nurse with an IV-bag holder. He also allegedly threatened a man at his synagogue who asked him to pipe down during services.
This crime spree is stunning, but what makes it national news is that it has all happened since 2021, when President Donald Trump commuted Braun’s 10-year prison sentence for smuggling marijuana. Braun, granted clemency during the last hours of Trump’s first term as president, is one of many recipients of a Trump pardon who has found himself back in trouble with the law. Some of them are people convicted of serious offenses on January 6, 2021, and then pardoned at the outset of Trump’s second term in office. Despite Trump’s depiction of the rioters as peace-loving patriots, more than a few of them have proved to be repeat offenders.
Braun, who is now back in prison, is not the only first-term recipient of clemency to be rearrested. Eli Weinstein, a convicted Ponzi schemer who received a last-minute 2021 commutation, was convicted on March 31 in a $41 million fraud case. Philip Esformes, whose sentence for his role in a $1.3 billion Medicare fraud was commuted in 2020, was arrested last year on domestic-violence-related charges, but the state dropped them a month later. The rapper Kodak Black has also been repeatedly arrested since receiving a commutation.
But the group of people convicted in connection with January 6 has been particularly likely to have found more trouble. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other crimes, was arrested for assault just a month after being pardoned—at the Capitol, no less. (D.C. prosecutors declined to pursue charges.) He also tried unsuccessfully to stir up conflict at a conference of Trump critics in February. Matthew Huttle, an Indiana man who received a pardon for entering the Capitol on January 6, was fatally shot by a deputy on January 27 after reaching for a gun. Emily Hernandez, a Missouri woman, was convicted for causing a fatal drunk-driving crash in 2022; the sentencing came days after her pardon for January 6 offenses. Andrew Taake of Texas was pardoned in January, then arrested in February on an outstanding charge for allegedly sending explicit messages to an undercover cop he believed was an underage girl.
It’s not just that clemency recipients have been accused of crimes since their pardons; they’ve also tried to use the pardons to get off for other offenses. Edward Kelley argued that his pardon from Trump for January 6 also covered his plot to kill the FBI agents who investigated him; a judge disagreed. Daniel Ball said that charges of illegally possessing a gun should be thrown out because the weapon was discovered in a search related to now-pardoned January 6 charges, and the acting U.S. attorney agreed, but Dan Wilson, a pardoned Capitol rioter who made a similar argument, had less luck with a federal appeals court. (Other defendants have made similar claims, with varying results.) David Daniel, who was charged with producing and possessing child pornography, also argued that a search that turned up the material was invalid because of his January 6 pardon, but the U.S. attorney in the case disagreed. (Daniel has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
Seeing so many people who received pardons get back in trouble with the law should be deeply embarrassing for Trump—though to be fair, pardoning people for a violent assault on the Capitol should have been embarrassing to him as well. He is not the first president to issue clemency for personal reasons, but presidential administrations usually carefully administer commutations and pardons, in part to avoid recidivism. The Trump White House, however, has shown little regard for the process. Last month, it fired Justice Department pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer after she opposed restoring gun rights for the actor Mel Gibson, then tried to block her from testifying to Congress.
Trump, the first convicted felon to serve as president, has long claimed that he will restore “law and order” in America, but his definition is highly selective. Some of the president’s commutations and pardons are simply favors granted to people who are well connected, but in the case of the January 6 commutations, he was eager to reward loyalty and to make a political point: that he and they had both been subjects of political persecution.
This creates a nauseating contrast with statements this week in which administration officials have claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident living under protected legal status who was deported to El Salvador, is a terrorist, despite a total lack of evidence—and despite the fact that the government has previously acknowledged his deportation was “an administrative error.” The search for some offense to pin on Abrego Garcia is also being done to make a political point. If Trump is eager to find dangerous criminals, he could do so more easily by looking at his pardon list.
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Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- A federal judge found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in contempt over its “willful disregard” of his order temporarily blocking the deportations the administration has justified under a wartime law.
- The Justice Department is suing Maine for allowing trans students to play in girls’ and women’s school sports. Maine Governor Janet Mills stated that she will “vigorously defend” the state against the lawsuit.
- California became the first state to sue the Trump administration over the tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.
Evening Read
Why Am I So Tired?
By Olga Khazan
The first sign of Mom Fatigue is leaving weird stuff in the fridge. Olivia Walch once got so tired that she put a box of Cheerios in the refrigerator. For Erin Wamsley, it was mugs of coffee and clean dishes; for Amanda Lamp, a pen. Maya Cash Carpenter told me her car keys sometimes turn up there.
Read the full article.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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