A360
Atlas AI
White House officials are weighing whether President Donald Trump should issue 250 pardons to mark the nation’s 250th birthday, according to reporting on preliminary internal discussions. The idea would tie clemency to the semiquincentennial, giving Trump a highly visible way to place his own stamp on the national celebration. No decision has been made, and the White House has said Trump alone will decide any clemency action.
Possible announcement dates under discussion include June 14, Flag Day and Trump’s birthday, or July 4, the country’s 250th Independence Day.
The proposal would mark another expansion of a pardon power Trump has already used aggressively in his second term. The Justice Department’s clemency page lists Trump’s January 2025 proclamation covering offenses tied to Jan. 6, followed by individual grants including Ross Ulbricht, Trevor Milton and Changpeng Zhao.
The same official list shows Milton was pardoned after a securities and wire fraud conviction, while Zhao was pardoned after pleading guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program at Binance. That record is why a 250-person round would not arrive as a routine holiday gesture; it would land in an election-year fight over whether clemency is being used as mercy, politics or leverage.
Potential Beneficiaries
Several famous defendants and convicts have become part of the wider clemency conversation, though none has been confirmed for any 250-person package. Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents explored a Trump pardon for the FTX founder after his 25-year fraud sentence, while Jho Low, the fugitive Malaysian financier accused in the 1MDB scandal, has a pending pardon request listed through the Justice Department process.
Tim Leissner, the former Goldman Sachs banker tied to 1MDB, has also sought clemency, and Pras Michel of the Fugees was sentenced to 14 years in prison for illegal foreign-money and lobbying schemes linked in part to Low. Other high-profile names around clemency include Ghislaine Maxwell, whose lawyer has discussed seeking relief, along with Elizabeth Holmes and Archegos founder Bill Hwang, both reported to have sought sentence relief or a pardon.
The political danger for the White House is that Democrats are already investigating whether Trump’s recent pardons and commutations were influenced by money, lobbying or personal access. CBS News reported that Sen. Peter Welch and Reps. Dave Min and Raul Ruiz sent letters to more than a dozen clemency recipients seeking records on payments to lawyers, lobbyists and influencers, communications with federal officials, and donations to Trump-linked groups.
The inquiry includes Zhao, Milton, Joseph Schwartz, Lawrence Duran, David Gentile, Paul Walczak and Timothy Leiweke, among others. The White House has denied wrongdoing, and a spokesperson said people paying to lobby for pardons are wasting their money because the administration has a review process.
Restitution Concerns
The issue is not only who gets out of prison or receives a clean record. In financial-crime cases, clemency can affect restitution, fines and the practical ability of victims to recover losses. Democratic investigators are focusing on that point, arguing that some grants wiped away large financial penalties owed to victims or the government.
Reports indicate that Milton’s pardon came after he and his wife donated at least $3 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign and aligned political groups, while the White House said the donations played no role in the decision.
Trump’s team is casting the semiquincentennial as a year of patriotic ceremony, monuments and national spectacle. His January 2025 executive order created a White House task force for the 250th birthday, reinstated plans for a National Garden of American Heroes and called for 250 figures to be included in it.
The Justice Department’s rules for clemency still describe a formal process in which applicants file petitions, the department investigates and recommends, and the president makes the final decision. That structure leaves wide room for presidential discretion, but it also creates a paper trail that becomes politically sensitive when famous convicts, donors, lobbyists and allies are involved.
The biggest uncertainty is whether the White House can assemble a 250-person list that looks like national mercy rather than a scoreboard of access. Biden’s final clemency wave showed the hazards of large-number targets: he commuted nearly 2,500 drug sentences and said he had issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president, but the scale still drew criticism over vetting and political timing.
Trump faces a sharper version of that problem because his recent clemency record includes Jan. 6 defendants, crypto executives, white-collar offenders and political allies. If the plan moves ahead, the first market and political reaction will turn less on the number 250 than on the names attached to it.