"The Quest to Get a Pardon in the Trump Era: ‘It’s Who You Know’"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new New York Times piece documenting various realities that are well-known to those who have been paying attention to the clemency activities of recent Presidents.  Here are excerpts from a terrific piece worth reading in full:

Few constitutional powers lie so wholly at the whims of the president as the power to pardon. No details need to be worked out beforehand and no agency apparatus is needed to carry a pardon out.  The president declares a person officially forgiven, and it is so.

A layer of government lawyers has long worked behind the scenes, screening the hundreds of petitions each year, giving the process the appearance of objectivity and rigor. But technically — legally — this is unnecessary.  A celebrity game show approach to mercy, doling the favor out to those with political allegiance or access to fame, is fully within the law.

The show isn’t new.  Absolving political allies is a notorious if decades-old practice, and Bill Clinton was hardly sticking to procedure when he included friends, family and the well-connected in his last-minute clemency spree.  But Mr. Trump is not waiting for the last minute.

On Tuesday, he issued more pardons, this time for two Oregon ranchers who had been serving sentences for arson on federal land. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was apparently among the ranchers’ strongest supporters.  Mr. Trump has said he is considering pardons for Martha Stewart, the lifestyle guru, and Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, and people whose cases are championed by professional football players.  He has rebuffed questions as to whether he was planning to pardon any of his own associates — or himself, for that matter.

Pardon seekers have been watching all this.  Having once put their hopes in an opaque bureaucratic process, they are now approaching their shot at absolution as if marketing a hot start-up: scanning their network of acquaintances for influence and gauging degrees of separation from celebrity.  What’s the best way to get a letter to Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and close Trump ally?  How hard would it be to pull aside Robert Jeffress, the prominent Trump-backing pastor, after a church service?

“It’s who you know now,” said Weldon Angelos, whose cause for clemency has been supported by politicians, judges and celebrities. At the consent of prosecutors, Mr. Angelos was released from prison in 2016, after serving a quarter of a 55-year sentence on a drug-related conviction. Now he is seeking a full pardon.  “Everyone’s now trying to get their names out there, to get some buzz,” he said. “That’s the strategy I’m seeing”

Self-promotion in pursuit of forgiveness comes naturally to some and strikes others as absurd.  But there is broad agreement on one point. The standard, procedural route to presidential clemency — a process that has become ever more impenetrable — has hardly been a portrait of justice itself...

Clemency petitions go through the Office of Pardon Attorney in the Justice Department, a system set up more than a hundred years ago to lessen the risks and hassles of leaving an entire nation’s pleas for compassion to one person.  For decades, the process worked smoothly, and hundreds of clemency grants were issued each year. President Dwight D. Eisenhower alone granted over 1,000 pardons.

But starting about 40 years ago, “the prosecutors really got a hold of the process,” said Margaret Love, who was the Pardon Attorney from 1990 to 1997, and now represents clemency applicants. “They became increasingly hostile to the pardon power.”  Even as laws have grown harsher, the number of pardons has dwindled significantly. “It is so secretive and the standards are so subjective,” Ms. Love said.  “They operate like a lottery. Except a lottery is fair.”

In 2014, the Obama administration set up a clemency initiative that led to 1,715 sentence commutations, by far the most of any president.  Still, this accounted for only about 5 percent of the commutation petitions submitted during his two terms. As for full pardons, the Obama administration was stingier than most of its predecessors. The traditional clemency process, as a pardon attorney described in her 2016 resignation letter, remained sidelined and backlogged.

“The process,” wrote Luke Scarmazzo of his attempt at clemency in the Obama years, “was a bureaucratic nightmare.”  In 2008 Mr. Scarmazzo was sentenced to more than two decades in prison for running a medical marijuana dispensary in California. He and his co-defendant, Ricardo Montes, spent months working on an application, but in the end Mr. Montes received a commutation, while Mr. Scarmazzo did not.  Now, “instead of support from career politicians and judges, we’re seeking support from celebrities and influential social icons,” Mr. Scarmazzo wrote in an email from prison.  “We’re less focused on pleasing the D.O.J. bureaucracy and more focused on grabbing the attention of the Oval Office.”

Much of the recent focus on clemency has either been on those, like Ms. Johnson, who are seeking release from prison, or on the famous pardon recipients like Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative provocateur, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former aide to Dick Cheney.  But there are countless people living quietly and whose time in the criminal justice system is years in the past, but who, because of the ever-expanding tally of consequences for felony convictions, feel permanently confined.