Inspired by the videos of Liz Oyer, I wanted to be able to verify her claims and just look up all the pardons more easily.
Tech Stack: Playwright - to sccrape the DOJ website SQLite - local database Astro 6 - Build out a static website from the sqlite db
All code is open source and available on Github.
> For any nonviolent offenses against the United States which they may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1 2014 through the date of this pardon (JAN 19, 2025).
https://pardonned.com/pardon/details/biden-family/
That’s 11+ years with no detail or description.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4311-...
> Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.
Not quite as long, but much more significant. (No violence exception, the criminal was the President, and they were crimes against the entire country, not some random drug/tax charges.)
Will have to crunch through the offenses in the db and see if anything else like this shows up.
Compare that to the other list. https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-recipients
This kind of topic is bound to bring up a lot of outrage, but I'd invite people to remember it's the Marc Richs of the old buying pardons that you should be directing that toward. There are plenty of people locked up for a very long time who really don't deserve it. I recall a Chumash woman I worked with at the LA County Museum of Natural History 24 years ago. I gave her a ride home a few times and eventually realized I was taking her to a halfway house, and it came out that the FBI has busted her in the early 90s for criminal conspiracy and her only actual offense was refusing to testify against her husband, who'd been selling marijuana on their reservation under the logic that he didn't believe US law should apply because of the historical treaties about tribal land. She did 10 years in federal prison for that.
That's kind of how I came upon the name for the site, I wanted to see if there is any truth to the rumors that people are selling and buying pardons. In order to investigate that, we needed a set of data to start from, in a manner that was easily queryable as opposed to what's on the DOJ website.
https://campaignlegal.org/update/inside-pardon-playbook-anal...
I'm pretty new to this particular issue so I don't have a ton to offer. It's really interesting, though. Nice site, by the way.
Why not include the January 6th pardons?
Working on a comparison tool, so we can see # of pardons over admins, it seems the number of pardons has been going up each administration.
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-don...
cmd-f trevor milton .. if the text for the sentence column doesn't say anything about a fine or restitution the system is not going to be able to figure that out.
The numbers for the prison time reduced is also technically incorrect, Ross Ulbricht, Rod Blagojevich and many others had already served many years in prison, so technically we should not count that as time reduced.
Maybe removing this pardoning power could be a bipartisan goal... I guess we shouldn't hold our breath.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-promises-pardon-ev...