WASHINGTON — For more than a year, President Donald Trump has struggled to control the United States’ law enforcement apparatus, frustrated that it remains at least partly out of his grasp. But he is increasingly turning to a tool that allows him to push back against a justice system he calls unfair.
Trump demonstrated Thursday that, in some instances, he still has the last word.
He pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative commentator convicted of campaign finance violations, and he said he may extend clemency to former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois and Martha Stewart, the lifestyle mogul.
Trump has bypassed the traditional system for granting pardons and disregarded more than 10,000 languishing applications to focus instead on prominent public figures whose cases resonated with him given his own grievances with investigators. Some critics said he may even be signaling associates like one of his personal lawyers, Michael Cohen, who is under investigation for possibly violating federal campaign finance laws, to stay strong and not help prosecutors.
The pardon for D’Souza, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to making illegal campaign contributions, was a victory for one of the president’s most vocal bases of support, the conservative news media. D’Souza has argued that he was singled out for prosecution by President Barack Obama’s administration because of his conservative politics, an argument that mirrors Trump’s assertions that his predecessor targeted him, too.
Trump attributed his interest in the three cases to indignation over selective or excessive justice. D’Souza, he said, “was very unfairly treated.” He described the 14-year sentence imposed on Blagojevich, a Democrat convicted on corruption charges, as “really unfair.” He said Stewart, who spent five months in prison for lying to investigators in a stock case, “was harshly and unfairly treated.”
The president’s intervention came as he rails against Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department and the FBI over various investigations involving Trump and his associates.
Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was one of many critics who saw Thursday’s pardon and the dangling of other clemency actions as a strategy to ensure loyalty within the president’s own circle.
“The possibility that he may also be sending a message to witnesses in a criminal investigation into his campaign is extremely dangerous,” Warner wrote on Twitter. “In the United States of America, no one is above the law.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.