Trump, Crime and Clemency

Terry H. Schwadron

Sept. 6, 2024

There was delayed “news” this week that a Florida man whose prison sentence for robbery and murder was commuted by Donald Trump was convicted anew this year of domestic violence against his wife.

Moreover, the commutation came about in the hurried last days in office without normal Justice Department review.

Just how Trump handled White House pardon processes outside traditional channels and procedures is both a reminder of his repeated disdain for traditional channels and procedures and a warning about his promises for specific interference with Justice Department independence to go after political “enemies,” should he win in November.

That Jaime A. Davidson, a commuted prisoner who had been denied the possibility of parole, was freed by Trump only to end up convicted for strangling his wife came to light in a Popular Information columnsubsequently picked up in The New York Times, MS-NBC and other outlets.

But, amid the noise of a campaign that equates Harris’ speaking accent with claims of “open” borders, this development has not landed with any force in the election debates. It has not been mentioned at all on right-leaning sites.

As Nicole Wallace of MSNBC noted, you could imagine quite a different partisan response from the political Right if it were Joe Biden or Kamala Harris who had pardoned someone who went on to commit a violent crime, particularly against a woman.

Indeed, the current focus for a new pro-Trump ad attacking Harris on crime involves a 14-year-old case in Texas while Harris was the district attorney in San Francisco. The killer in that case was a person who had arrived years earlier as a migrant at age 10, but the clear meaning of the ad was that somehow Harris and current immigration laws are to blame for that old crime, and anything else MAGA wants to load up on the immigration crime plate.

For Trump, who proclaims that America is in the grip of a Harris-fomented crime wave at every rally, it is hard to see the outcome of this act of clemency — and others, as it turns out — as anything but hypocrisy and an omen of worse to come.

Freed Murderer Returns with New Crime

Before he was freed, Davidson had been convicted of murder in 1993 as part of a robbery scheme in which an undercover police officer in upstate New York died. Davidson, who was sentenced to three months imprisonment for the domestic violence incident could face more time for violating conditions of his earlier release.

His commutation was not recommended by the Justice Department which normally reviews such requests, and instead came through a lawyer whose husband had represented some of Trump’s children. According to the media accounts, the commutation request was never even vetted by Justice, and the case raised objections from law enforcement about freeing someone in a case where a cop had died and about how those with inside connections got their cases before Trump outside normal channels.

There have been other clemency recipients who have faced new charges.

Eliyahu Weinstein, who had been serving 24 years for fraud, was freed two days before Trump left office, to now face new charges of allegedly cheating at least 150 people out of $35 million. Last month, Jonathan Braun, a convicted New York drug dealer also paroled by Trump was arrested on charges of assaulting his wife on at least twice and punching his 75-year-old father-in-law in the head. The conviction of Republican operative Jesse Benton related to a 2012 endorsement-buying scheme paroled by Trump was imprisoned last year after conviction for a campaign violation in 2016 involving an illegal contribution from a Russian businessman. Steve Bannon, Trump’s longtime political adviser, was pardoned for fraud, but has been convicted and is in prison for contempt of Congress.

The point is that we hear Trump continuously seek to portray Harris as soft on crime and insisting that crime rates — both violent and nonviolent — are way up when figures say the opposite for crimes of violence. Apart from his own legal woes, Trump insists that border woes are responsible, and attributable to Harris and Biden.

Asked last year how granting clemency to violent felons, including his vows to clear most convicted of Jan. 6, 2021, crimes, fit with criticism of Harris, Trump said he relied on an unnamed “commission” that advised him on pardons. The record shows that he relied on son-in-law Jared Kushner and his family and daughter, Ivanka.

Of equal interest is a new report by Just Security that documents a dozen times during the Trump presidency in which Trump sought to direct the prosecution of Hillary Clinton and other perceived political enemies from the FBI who investigated his campaign’s Russia connections. “The cascade of election coverage, commentary and speculation about how Donald Trump might use the power of the presidency to retaliate against his perceived political enemies has overlooked important context: Trump has done just that, while he was president, at least a dozen times,” the Just Security article finds.

Stepping back, one must wonder how Trump’s own decisions on crime and commutations meshes with his acid tongue. It’s a reminder to vote on what the candidates do, rather than on what they say.

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