What did Donald Trump do today?

He let slip he'd pardoned a wealthy donor for fraud a second time.

Trump has made little secret of the fact that criminals can buy their way out of jail. He's accepted cryptocurrency fees, political endorsements, contributions to his super PAC, and carefully worded testimony in potential criminal investigations in exchange for various acts of clemency.

Late this Friday afternoon, though, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged a pardon so overtly corrupt that even Trump didn't want to have to defend it. Earlier this week, in secret, he signed pardons for several wealthy individuals who had donated to his political causes. They included a pardon for a woman  convicted in 2024 of fraud whom he had previously pardoned in 2021 for a different fraud conviction.

"Fraud," for which Trump himself has been criminally convicted, is the excuse he is currently using to justify a terror campaign against Somali-Americans.

No White House official was willing to speak on the record today about the nearly unprecedented second pardon for Adriana Camberos, who made millions of dollars selling fake bottles of energy drinks. (Camberos will now likely escape having to pay her victims back, which was part of her criminal sentence.) The only justification given was that she and her co-conspirators were unfairly targeted after Trump's first pardon, even though she committed the second crime after receiving the first pardon.

In other words, Trump is saying that anyone he pardons is effectively immune from ever being subject to the law, even if they break the law again. Trump has already tried to get courts to stretch his pardons of the January 6th insurrectionists to cover unrelated crimes, and issued a second pardon to one insurrectionist who committed unrelated gun crimes that were discovered during his first prosecution. His DOJ has dropped federal criminal charges against dozens of other insurrectionists.

In fairness to Trump, he's also given away some acts of clemency, mostly to friends and family members, to say nothing of co-conspirators. 

Why does this matter? 

• Open corruption is worse than doing it in secret.