We are fully in the “mutually assured pardoning” phase of the use of the pardon pen. President Trump has issused pardons for 77 people connected to the “election interference” case in Georgia, and anyone who was named as an alternate elector.

The news of the pardons broke last night, courtesy of Trump’s “clemency czar” Ed Martin.

Important pardon of Alternate Electors of 2020!! pic.twitter.com/iuDGv9fqyy

— Eagle Ed Martin (@EagleEdMartin) November 10, 2025

President Trump granted pardons for 77 individuals tied to a plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election — including his close allies Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, a Justice Department attorney announced late Sunday.

Those given a “full, complete and unconditional” pardon were allegedly entangled in a scheme to organize alternate slates of electors from battleground states that former Vice President Joe Biden won, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and Michigan.

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” Trump wrote in the pardoning document.

Pardons also went to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and other 2020 campaign aides who allegedly worked together to submit names of fake electors from the four states to Congress to keep him in office.

Trump advisers John Eastman, Christina Bobb and Boris Epshteyn were also among the dozens of prominent figures pardoned.

The sweeping proclamation, which Trump signed on Friday, notably does not pardon Trump himself.

“This pardon does not apply to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” a line near the end of the document said.

The pardons are mainly symbolic because none of the 77 individuals were charged on the federal level, though they could prevent future administrations from prosecuting the alleged co-conspirators.

Now, President Trump cannot grant pardons for state convictions or plea deals, so those who have convictions and plea deals in Georgia still have them. However, the legal theory put forward on behalf of pardoning the alternative electors by Ed Martin, is that alternative electors are not a legal unknown, and these should have been federal charges, not state ones, if the charges were brought, as lawyer Margot Cleveland points out in her piece at The Federalist.

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.”

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.

No one will disagree that this is a “novel” legal theory. Would it hold up in court? Cleveland thinks no one will want to try, lest it expose additional collusion between prosecutors and the Biden administration. We shall have to see if that holds true or not.

If Democrats want someone to blame and yell at, we all know who started this.

Joe Biden pardoned his son after saying on camera he wouldn't. The media tepidly shrugged when he did it.

We predicted he would do that. We also said where this would all lead. So here we are. https://t.co/JOMfqiF4BM

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) November 10, 2025

The person who “broke the norms” when it comes to pardons was Joe Biden, who lied straight to everyone’s faces and said he wouldn’t pardon Hunter, and then went on to pardon Hunter – not to mention his siblings, the January 6th committee, and so many others. Trump then pardoned people who had been involved in January 6th, and this set of pardons is a continuation of that.

Is this good for the country? Nope. Is this “mutually assured pardoning” that simply follows what the other side has already done? Yes. This is why using the “nuclear option” to get rid of the filibuster would eventually come back to bite whoever does it in the ass. When the “norms” get broken, there are no limiting principles left for the other side to pay lip service about. Enjoy it, Democrats – your guy started this. President Trump is just continuing the process.

Featured image: President Donald Trump on September 23, 2025, official White House Photo by Daniel Torok, cropped, public domain