Sen. Chris Murphy has raised the red alert about President Donald Trump’s rapidly growing number of presidential pardons, telling MS NOW’s Chris Hayes that the pardons are an example of “bread-and-butter corruption.”
“I mean, he has made a series of what would seem to be audaciously politically toxic pardons,” Hayes said to Murphy on his Wednesday night show. “I mean, a man convicted and sentenced for 40 years for trafficking cocaine into the U.S., someone convicted of an enormous fraud enterprise and defrauding investors,” he said of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, whom Trump pardoned last month.
”I think today he’s now pardoning someone who is indicted by his own Justice Department this July,” Hayes continued, referring to former entertainment executive Tim Leiweke, who was indicted in July for orchestrating a conspiracy to rig a bidding process. “And when he’s asked about it, he says, I don’t know who they are. What are we supposed to make of that?” Hayes asked.
“My sense is that somebody is getting rich, ultimately,“ Murphy replied. “There is a cabal of administration officials and MAGA-friendly lobbyists that are in league together, they all huddle together at these elite restaurants and clubs in Washington, D.C., and they likely hatch deals in which, if somebody pays a MAGA-affiliated lobbyist a couple of hundred thousand dollars, then maybe you’ll be able to get a pardon.”
During his second term, Trump has pardoned over 1600 people, many of whom had been convicted over their participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
In the past month, he has pardoned allies who attempted to help him challenge the result of the 2020 election, a fraudster convicted of orchestrating a $1.6 billion Ponzi scheme, and a Democrat charged with bribery and money laundering, as well as the former president of Honduras, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking offences.
Murphy also discussed Trump’s pardoning of billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who was convicted of money laundering in 2023.
“The Binance owner, the owner of one of these big crypto companies, was pardoned. And this is a bad, bad guy. He pled guilty. I mean, it wasn’t like he was contesting the charges,” Murphy told Hayes.
“He had essentially set up a company that was being used to launder money for terrorists and for child sex predators, and he got a pardon pretty explicitly because his company had chosen to give Trump’s crypto coin advantage in the marketplace,” he continued.
“That’s not just Trump making money. That’s anybody that gets inside information from Trump on when he’s going to boost the cryptocurrency. If they get just two minutes notice of that, they can make millions of dollars.”
The Trump family has invested a significant amount of its wealth in cryptocurrency, including in a Trump-branded memecoin that has lost roughly one quarter of its value since August. An analysis by Bloomberg News found that the family’s crypto ventures have dragged their collective wealth down from $7.7 billion in early September to $6.7 billion.
“The cryptocurrency stuff, there’s clearly a whole group of people around him that are making millions of dollars, and they’re handing out favors to folks in the form of pardons in order to make sure that they get their pockets lined,” Murphy said. “I mean, that’s like just bread-and-butter corruption.”
