‘The golden age of white-collar crime’

Mr. Trump’s presidency has unfolded in a golden age of impunity for the rich that is unprecedented in modern history, Michael Hobbes writes in HuffPost. Since Mr. Trump took office, he notes, white-collar prosecutions have fallen to a record low, and what few cases are prosecuted mostly concern low-level con artists. In 2018, nearly 19,000 people were sentenced in federal court for drug crimes alone, he says, but prosecutors convicted just 37 corporate criminals who worked at companies with more than 50 employees. “An entrenched, unfettered class of superpredators is wreaking havoc on American society,” he argues. “And in the process, they’ve broken the only systems capable of stopping them.”

Amnesty for corrupt elites may have worsened under Mr. Trump, but it didn’t start with him, as the Times editorial board has written. It cited Jesse Eisinger’s book “The Chickenshit Club” — James Comey’s description of prosecutors who never lost a case because they avoided those they might lose — which documented how the Department of Justice had “lost the will and indeed the ability to go after the highest-ranking corporate wrongdoers.” The board wrote, “Industrial-level fraud by America’s banks nearly brought the world economy to its knees in 2008, and no senior executive was even charged.”

Nor is Mr. Trump’s clemency for well-connected criminals entirely without precedent, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald has noted on Twitter. George H.W. Bush, for example, pardoned six Reagan administration officials implicated in the Iran-contra scandal, including Elliott Abrams, who now serves as the special Representative for Venezuela at the State Department. Mr. Greenwald also raised the case of Marc Rich, a financier who was convicted of evading $48 million in taxes and other crimes. Mr. Rich’s wife, Denise Rich, was a prominent fund-raiser for the Clintons and the Democratic Party, and President Bill Clinton pardoned Mr. Rich on his last day in office. The New York Times editorial board called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.”

A similar dynamic seemed to be at play in at least one of Mr. Trump’s recent pardons, as The Daily Beast reports: Paul Pogue, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to underpaying his taxes and was sentenced to three years in prison, and whose family has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct contributions and in-kind air travel to the Trump Victory Committee. As in the Marc Rich case, the president gave no indication that he relied on the Justice Department’s vetting process before extending clemency to a benefactor.

‘A story of creeping authoritarianism’

Mr. Trump’s use of presidential pardon powers smacks more flagrantly of cronyism than that of his predecessors, according to Chris Cillizza at CNN. Past presidents have pardoned or commuted the sentences of those in their social circles, and many have done so more frequently than Mr. Trump, he says. “But no past president has been as transparently transactional in doling out clemency than Trump. Friend? Friend of a friend? Famous? You’ve got a very good chance of being considered for a pardon in Trump world,” he writes, pointing as an example to the case of Alice Marie Johnson, whose sentence Mr. Trump commuted at the request of Kim Kardashian West.