We followed the rules.

Clemency used to work. Then it stopped.

For most of the twentieth century clemency was ordinary government business. You filed, someone read it, and somewhere between a fifth and two-fifths of petitioners got an answer they could use. Then, in the 1990s, the pipeline closed — under presidents of both parties, and without anyone announcing it.

The numbers are not close. Truman granted 41 percent of the requests that reached him. In the 2017–21 term the Office of the Pardon Attorney received 12,078 requests and granted 238 — two percent. Obama received more petitions than any president in history, 36,544, and granted five in a hundred.

Share of clemency requests granted, by president

Figures are for completed terms, compiled by Pew Research Center from Office of the Pardon Attorney data. The 2017–21 term is shown; the current term is ongoing and not included. Biden's 29% is almost entirely categorical commutations — 4,165 commutations against 80 individual pardons. Whether that counts as the pardon power working as intended is a fair question. What is not in dispute is the volume: 4,245 clemency acts in one term against 238 in the term before it. The “other” category includes remissions, which reduce financial penalties, and respites, which are temporary reprieves often granted for medical reasons. McKinley totals cover fiscal years 1900 and 1901 only.

What the power is for

Nobody believes President Truman found 41% of petitioners innocent. Clemency has never been a finding of innocence. It is a constitutional power to correct a sentence out of proportion to what a person actually did, or a process that went wrong in a way the courts will not fix.

So when commentary treats every pardon as excusing a guilty person, it is describing something that has not been true of this power in any administration for over a century.

A power used a quarter of the time for ninety years is now used two percent of the time. Nothing was repealed. Nobody voted. It simply closed — and the people it stopped reaching are the ones who were never going to have a lobbyist.

Then people started trying to buy it

By October 2025 the grants had stopped again. NBC News reported that nothing had moved since May, and that senior White House officials had grown concerned about outsiders attempting to profit from the process. Four people familiar with the discussions described it.

The reported figures are worth reading slowly. A plan floated to secure a pardon for $30 million. Proposals put to lobbyists as high as $5 million. A $1 million payment to a Washington lobbyist, disclosed in lobbying filings as being for executive relief.

Two senior officials told NBC that the Chief of Staff pushed back and tightened the process specifically to put distance between it and the people trying to broker influence. Clemency resumed that month.

Marc Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and a national authority on clemency, told NBC that what deserves scrutiny is the process being used now — informal, closed and opaque — while the thousands of people who followed the rules and filed through the pardon attorney are passed over.

The old evaluation system needed demolishing, he said. What replaces it has to be accessible, fair, transparent and lasting.

Marc Osler, quoted in NBC News, 24 October 2025

The White House press secretary has said each clemency request is intensely vetted and reviewed, and that the President makes every decision personally. We take that at face value. Ours went in through the pardon attorney, with every document attached, and we are waiting.

What was proposed, and what was granted

In May 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported that White House officials were considering 250 pardons to mark the semiquincentennial. The Atlantic followed in June with more than a dozen sources. Advisers were reported to be divided on whether it would help or hurt.

On 3 July 2026, the eve of the anniversary, the President granted seventeen pardons. The Department of Justice publishes the list.

Eleven individuals and six companies. Fifteen of the seventeen are Clean Air Act cases — diesel emissions equipment, several of them from the same business cluster. Two are not.

And what was denied

Eleven days later, on 14 July 2026, the Pardon Attorney notified United States Attorneys of the disposition of the rest.

Five thousand nine hundred and seven people, in one letter, on one day. Every one of them had filed through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, in the ordinary way, at their own expense. None of them received a reason, and none of them can appeal.

If you think this power is being misused

Some of you look at the pardons that make the news and think the whole power is rotten. We are not going to argue with you about any particular case. We said at the top that we take no position on that, and we meant it.

But look at what your objection is actually about. It is not that the power exists. It is about who it reaches — that it keeps finding people who were already close to it, and keeps missing everyone else.

That is our argument too.

And here is the part worth sitting with: the answer to a power that only reaches the well-connected is not a smaller power. Shrinking it costs nothing to anyone who can get a phone call returned. It costs everything to the person whose petition has been sitting in a queue for six years with no one to ask about it.

For most of the last century this was an ordinary remedy that reached ordinary people. Then it closed — and it closed hardest on the ones with the fewest ways in.

We are not asking you to agree with us about anything else.