Trump Pardons 77 Citizens Targeted By Dems In Election Lawfare

President Donald Trump pardoned 77 U.S. citizens targeted by Democrat attorneys general for their participation in alternative elector efforts and challenges to 2020 presidential election vulnerabilities. A memo obtained exclusively by The Federalist explains the theory behind the presidential pardons issued to defendants charged with various violations of state criminal law — a novel theory but one that corners the Democrats behind the weaponization of the criminal justice system.

On Friday, the Trump Administration began contacting the scores of Republicans still facing criminal charges in a handful of blue states for their service as alternative electors — or connection to the alternative electors — conveying the president’s decision to pardon them. The official pardon provides that “the President grant[s] a full, complete, and unconditional pardon for all conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential electors, whether or not recognized by any state or state official, in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election.”

President Trump’s pardon adopts the recommendation the Office of U.S. Pardon Attorney Edward R. Martin provided in a 15-page memorandum obtained exclusively by The Federalist. In that memorandum, Martin detailed the numerous illegal changes to election laws that proceeded the 2020 presidential election, stressing that “[l]awsuits brought to challenge the unconstitutional changes to election laws, procedural violations, ineligible voters, and election irregularities were dismissed by courts on technical and procedural grounds rather than being fully adjudicated on the merits.”

To preserve those legal challenges, the Republican electors in the contested states met and cast votes as alternative electors for Donald Trump, transmitting those results to Congress consistent with, as the memo explained, “core Article II and Twelfth Amendment federal functions.” Martin’s memorandum further explained:

Those actions were taken based on sound historical and legal precedent, and ensured that legislatures in the Challenged States could select the rightful winner of the Election in the event the legislatures or the courts determined there had been a flawed calculation of votes or an unconstitutional deviation from state election law resulting in the wrong electoral votes being counted.

Martin, of course, is right, as The Federalist detailed in “The Left’s 2020 ‘Fake Electors’ Narrative Is Fake News.” As The Federalist reported and as Martin also explained in his memorandum, the Trump campaign’s submission of alternative electors mirrored the process the Kennedy campaign used in 1960 after the acting governor of Hawaii certified the Republican electors to Nixon. There, as in Trump’s case, Kennedy had filed a challenge to the results in state court, and accordingly Democrats certified three alternative electors to cast their ballots for Kennedy in the event the court ruled in his favor. 

Two of the three Democrat electors were retired federal judges and yet they certified — as did the Trump alternative electors — that they were “duly and legally qualified and appointed” electors for Kennedy. The Democrats further certified “the votes of the state of Hawaii” were given to Kennedy. Kennedy later prevailed in his legal challenge, with his alternative electors then casting their votes in his favor.

Notwithstanding the clear precedent for using alternative electors, former FBI Director Christopher Wray, with then-Attorney General Merrick Garland’s explicit approval, launched a criminal investigation into Donald Trump, his lawyers, and the alternate electors based on the supposed “fraudulent certificates of electors’ votes [] submitted to the Archivist of the United States” for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Whistleblowers have since revealed “that the FBI wasn’t merely targeting Trump or a few high-level officials, but potentially more than 150 individuals.”

Following an extensive federal investigation into the use of alternative electors, “Special Counsel Jack Smith only charged Donald Trump with crimes related to the contested election, although the indictment described several supposed co-conspirators. However, several states — or in the case of Georgia, Fulton County — pursued nearly identical criminal cases against the alternative electors, as well as other lawyers and members of the Trump campaign.”

Those “so-called state criminal proceedings involving Trump electors filed by Democrat state attorneys general in Arizona (Kris Mayes), Nevada (Aaron Ford), Michigan (Dana Nessel), and Wisconsin (Josh Kaul), and the now disgraced Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia, are not truly state proceedings,” election lawyer Cleta Mitchell maintained last week at The Federalist. In “Presidential Pardons Are Needed For Trump Electors Persecuted By Biden DOJ,” Mitchell, who had represented the Trump Administration in his challenge to the Georgia election outcome, claimed “[e]very one of the indictments stemmed from the Arctic Frost investigations conducted by the Biden FBI and DOJ, and the Democrat prosecutors acted at the behest of the Biden DOJ in bringing the fake criminal charges against Trump and his electors, lawyers, and supporters.”

“The state proceedings are simply proxies for what had been intended by the Biden DOJ to be federal charges filed in Washington, D.C.,” Mitchell concluded.

U.S. Pardon Attorney Martin’s memorandum to President Trump stresses a similar point, namely that the “prosecutions are attempts by partisan state actors to shoehorn fanciful and concocted state law violations onto what are clearly federal constitutional obligations of the 2020 Trump campaign: the establishment of the contingent electors, the actions attendant to their roles as presidential electors, and their duties under established historical and legal precedent to exercise their responsibilities as electors – all of which are functions of federal – not state – law.”

Under the memorandum’s reasoning, then, because the states are prosecuting the 2020 Trump electors, and those connected to the decision to use alternative electors, for exercising a solely federal function, the President of the United States can pardon them for their supposed state law crimes. This novel theory seeks to sidestep the normal limitation on the president’s pardon authority — an authority limited to pardoning individuals for solely federal crimes.

The Democrat attorneys general behind the prosecutions may not wish to push the matter because doing so could expose either their complicity with the Biden Administration or with Democrat activists. Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis already learned that lesson when her efforts to prosecute the Georgia electors and Trump attorneys led to the discovery that “both the Fulton County prosecutor and her paramour-paid junior prosecutor engaged with Biden Administration officials both before and after obtaining the indictment.”

In Arizona, following her indictment, Christina Bobb, a former Senior Election Integrity Counsel at the RNC, discovered that the States United Democracy Center, a left-wing non-profit organization, “initiated and planned the strategy for [Arizona’s] prosecution.” According to her Motion to Disqualify the Attorney General, Bobb only discovered the Arizona AG’s collaboration with States United “due to an error.” Specifically, the AG’s office accidently attached “the memo prepared by States United planning the legal strategy for this prosecution” to a court filing, exposing the relationship. Afterwards, the Arizona AG claimed it had entered in an attorney-client relationship with States United and then refused to disclose any further interactions with the liberal outfit.

Given States United’s connection to the Democrat Party and its unsavory involvement with the targeting of Republicans, as well as the growing scandal of Arctic Frost, the Arizona Democrat AG might well have wanted to let its criminal case against the electors die a quiet death. That seemed a likely outcome after the trial court in Arizona remanded the case to the grand jury for reconsideration, holding the State failed “to make a fair and impartial presentation to the grand jury” when it did not properly instruct the grand jury on the Electoral Count Act. That case has since been stayed.

The Georgia case is likewise on hold while the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, who was assigned to review the case after the Georgia Supreme Court let stand the lower court’s disqualification of DA Willis, considers whether charges are appropriate. In Wisconsin, charges brought by the Democrat Attorney General against two attorneys and one former Trump campaign worker based solely on the theory of “fake” electors, remain pending after the trial court denied the Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss. Conversely, in Michigan, a trial judge recently dismissed the charges against the electors, concluding no crime occurred. Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel has yet to announce whether she intends to appeal that dismissal. And in Nevada, charges against the alternative electors remain pending in two courts, as the Democrat Attorney General there filed a back-up charge after the first court dismissed the charges based on improper venue.

While there is no trial imminent, for some five years, the electors and those working with them on behalf of Trump have had their lives and livelihoods uprooted due to the Democrats’ lawfare. They have also faced a huge financial and emotional toll. The president’s pardons seek to end the injustice.

Whether the courts agree that the president’s pardon authority extends to crimes allegedly committed in performing duties under Article II remains to be seen. But the move forces Democrats to own the weaponization they launched in 2020.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.