What did Donald Trump do today?
He double-pardoned at January 6th attacker for crimes unrelated to January 6th—or at least someone did.
Daniel Edwin Wilson was convicted in 2024 of illegal firearm possession. That crime was unrelated to his participation in the January 6th insurrection attempting to keep Trump in power in defiance of the 2020 election results. Wilson was also charged and convicted for his role in that attack. Trump's blanket pardon of all the attackers erased that conviction, but not the totally unrelated gun charge.
The White House acknowledged today that Trump issued a second pardon for Wilson, supposedly on the theory that he never would have been caught committing one crime if he hadn't been investigated for the other. This is not how the law works for anyone other than people trying to overthrow the government on Trump's behalf: if police respond to a noise complaint and find an assault in progress, they don't have to ignore it because it wasn't the specific crime they were expecting to uncover.
Wilson was one of a long list of January 6th criminals blanket-pardoned by Trump who quickly committed other crimes.
It's not actually clear when or if Trump signed the pardon, which is dated Friday. Trump was recently caught using an autopen to sign pardons (and possibly other documents), which the White House belatedly tried to blame on a website glitch. There's nothing illegal or improper about signing documents that way: presidents, including Trump, can and do use autopens for ceremonial documents like pardons without it affecting their validity.
But Trump has been trying for months to deflect concerns about his own cognitive struggles by spinning stories of President Joe Biden's supposed incapacity concealed by use of the autopen. Trump, who has allowed his appointees like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller to wield the powers of the presidency almost without limit, does not like the suggestion that he's not really in charge of his own White House. (Trump spent today golfing.)
There's no real reason to believe Trump would have objected to Wilson being pardoned, but it's genuinely unclear if he knew that he or someone acting on his behalf had done it. Trump supposedly granted a pardon to the corrupt cryptocurrency CEO Changpeng Zhao on October 23, but a few days later said he had no idea who Zhao was.
Why does this matter?
- Accusing your political enemies of your own failings or weaknesses is called projection, and it's not a sign of good mental health.
- Letting your political supporters commit crimes with impunity is what dictators do.