A Sunday announcement that President Donald Trump had pardoned Rudy Giuliani and more than 70 others who promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election shows he continues using his power in his second term to promote the mischief he incited during his first term.
The list of the pardoned included conservative Christians who are committed to Trump, including Jenna Ellis, the attorney who worked for James Dobson before joining Fox News and then working with Giuliani as part of the “crack legal team” that unsuccessfully sued to overturn election results.
Others receiving pardons included:
- Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of Turning Point USA, the group founded by the late Charlie Kirk. As BNG reported last year, Bowyer was one of 11 fake electors indicted for efforts to disenfranchise Arizona voters by falsely claiming Trump won.
- John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who provided legal rationales for overturning the election and has raised $937,099 for his legal defense on the Christian platform GiveSendGo.
- Attorney Sidney Powell, who claimed the Holy Spirit guided her to support Trump and pled guilty for her crimes in Georgia.
Unlike the pardons Trump issued on his first day in office that freed nearly 1,600 people convicted of federal crimes for their roles in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the new pardons announced Sunday are largely symbolic and do not erase state criminal verdicts for those facing justice in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada.
The pardons were announced on the personal X account of “Eagle Ed Martin,” a former executive with Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum who calls himself the “Trump Weaponization Czar” for his work to use the power of the justice system to go after anyone who sought to hold Trump accountable for his words and deeds.
“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 presidential election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” said Martin, whose Sunday message was followed by a 15-page Monday memorandum that recited a laundry list of MAGA grievances.
Martin said America’s 200-year history of fair and free elections “died in 2020. For the first time in American history, partisan state and local officials, relying on narrow exceptions for absentee voting and signature verification, attempted to conduct a fully remote presidential election.”
His claims are documented lies.
He also railed against “biased media (that) failed to accurately inform the American people of the unlawful actions taken to deprive our country of a free and fair election” and claimed the Biden administration engaged in “a massive, covert social media censorship operation instigated by federal officials operating to suppress freedom of speech about election” issues.
These claims also have been proved repeatedly to be lies.
In addition to supporting people who engaged in crimes to show their support for Trump, Trump’s Justice Department has fired or prosecuted FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors who helped prosecute and convict the January 6 criminals Trump pardoned.
“Despite the near universal convictions, January 6 prosecutors have experienced significant retaliation after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration,” said the Stanford Law Review. “Approximately 18 January 6 prosecutors were fired, at least seven senior January 6 prosecutors were demoted, and the department immediately launched an investigation into all prosecutorial uses of the principal obstruction statute in the cases.”
The law review called these acts “a notable attempt at what political scientists call ‘capturing the referees’ — a key indicator of democratic backsliding and failure around the world.”
Jenna Ellis thanked Trump for her pardon on Monday’s episode of her radio show, “Jenna Ellis in the Morning,” which she has hosted for three years. The show is produced by American Family Association, where she serves as senior adviser on public policy. “A lot of us have gone through a lot more trauma than anybody listening really understands,” she said.
Ellis once claimed, “We know that the election was stolen from President Trump and we can prove that,” and later said she was suffering persecution over her role in helping Trump. She eventually made a tearful confession in a Georgia courtroom, saying she had been deceived. She pled guilty to a felony in Georgia for aiding and abetting false statements. She avoided nine fraud and conspiracy felony charges in Arizona by agreeing to testify against Giuliani. She was censured as a lawyer in Colorado.
TPUSA’s Tyler Bowyer also expressed thanks for his pardon in a post on X: “Very grateful for the support of the President, @EagleEdMartin and the many who have looked out for us since this expensive injustice has taken place in the swing states. We were targeted to sideline many of us politically. It has nearly bankrupted and caused severe trauma to many good people on this list — this is why it is important to get to the bottom of what was carried out against good faith and active citizens who took to the courts to ask questions about the 2020 election.”
“Despite the near universal convictions, January 6 prosecutors have experienced significant retaliation after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.”
In other January 6 news, a spending bill that could help reopen the government includes a provision that could allow eight Republican senators to sue the government for $500,000 each over complaints that their phone records were subpoenaed as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
As BNG reported in March, Trump continues to falsely claim he won the 2020 election and is institutionalizing these falsehoods by rewriting history and using the power of the Oval Office to turn his lies into law.
This article was originally published in Baptist News Global.
