‘There is no process’: Trump insiders admit they can’t keep up with the ‘chaos’ of his pardons

President Donald Trump’s approach to granting presidential pardons is in a state of “chaos,” with even his own White House staff struggling to keep up with the haphazardness of the process, according to a report.

Trump appointed Alice Marie Johnson to be his “pardon czar” when he returned to the Oval Office last January, having secured clemency from him herself during his first term with the help of Kim Kardashian, but, according to NOTUS, she struggled to secure a meeting with the president late last year to discuss possible candidates for reprieve.

One scheduled sit-down was reportedly cancelled, only for Johnson to pin Trump down at Mar-a-Lago on New Year’s Eve.

Approximately two weeks later, she announced pardons from her recommendation list for four NFL players – for crimes ranging from perjury to drug trafficking – the first time in months any were approved and the most granted since the previous May, with only occasional appeals signed off on in the interim.

“There is no process, there is no right way to do this,” a White House insider involved in the pardoning process told the publication. “It’s chaos.”

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NOTUS’s sources indicated that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was responsible for Johnson being blocked from gaining access to Trump, his top aide having taken action to tighten up the process after growing “concerned about the optics” of pardons and the prospect of people seeking to profit from them.

“It may seem chaotic, but there’s a defined process in place,” a senior White House official insisted in conversation with the publication.

Another official told The Independent that there had not been any change to the process.

“The administration has always had a robust review process, which involves the Department of Justice, Alice Johnson, and the White House Counsel’s office,” they said.

“Ultimately, President Trump is the final decider. Susie is simply ensuring the process, which has always existed, is followed... Alice regularly meets with White House officials and the president on pardon recommendations.

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“Nobody should be profiting off pardons and the president and administration will do everything to ensure that doesn’t happen. Anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is wasting their money.”

The president is understood to have no set time in his schedule to review petitions for clemency, nor does the administration have a set number of pardons it intends to grant.

There are almost a dozen people working on pardons at any one time, NOTUS reports. Johnson previously said she personally presents prospective cases to Trump in the Oval Office, in the company of Wiles and White House Counsel David Warrington.

“It has to be clearly laid out to him,” she said. “I’ll take the lead, [Warrington] and myself on explaining the cases, really explaining every aspect.”

To date, the president has pardoned approximately 1,700 people since commencing his second term, compared with 237 during his first.

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That began with his notorious blanket pardon of 1,500 people prosecuted by the Biden-era Department of Justice for their part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, with Trump shrugging off advice to grant clemency on a case-by-case basis, preferring not to draw distinctions between them, no matter the severity of the offense.

He has since issued a historic number of pardons for white-collar criminals and political allies accused of fraud, bribery and corruption, relying on the sweeping powers of the executive branch to effectively redefine what is criminal, from bailing out dozens of people who support his agenda to “normalizing public corruption” and downplaying the crimes of convicted fraudsters, according to former pardon attorney Liz Oyer.

Some of those pardons have caused bafflement, notably his decision to excuse former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison on drug-trafficking and weapons charges, at the same time that his administration was going after Nicolas Maduro’s regime in Venezuela on similar grounds.

Another was the case of Chinese billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to what prosecutors called “willful violations of anti-money laundering” laws, but who Trump said was the victim of a “witch hunt,” despite also frankly admitting: “I don’t know who he is.”

The president has so far decided against pardoning either Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell or rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, but has frequently been asked about the prospect of his doing so.