Prez Trump gets back to clemency by commuting sentence of George Santos
As noted in this prior post, Prez Donald Trump was quite active with his clemency pen at the start of his second term in the Oval Office. He granted multiple pardons in each and every month from January through May of 2025 (and, of course, did a massive clemency grant on Inauguration Day for those prosecuted for Jan 6 events). But, interestingly, he then went almost five full months without grantin any form of clemency.
But Prez Trump picked up his clemency pen today, as this Politico article details:
President Donald Trump granted clemency on Friday evening to George Santos, whose lies about his biography and misuse of campaign funds emerged after he won a seat in Congress from New York and ultimately landed him in prison.
Santos had served less than three months of a seven-year term for wire fraud and identity theft when Trump announced in a social media post that he would commute the rest of the sentence.
The president cited the former New York lawmaker’s political support in the announcement. “George Santos was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” Trump wrote in the post. “George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated. Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY.”