White House Weighing 250 Pardons for America's 250th Birthday. No Decision Made Yet.

The Plan, Such As It Is

The White House has been discussing a possible announcement of 250 presidential pardons timed to the country's 250th birthday celebration, according to The Atlantic, which cited 14 people familiar with the conversations. The Wall Street Journal reported the same concept last month. The framing making the rounds internally: "250 pardons for 250 years."

As of last Friday, Trump had not been formally presented with the proposal, a White House official told The Atlantic. The idea may never reach his desk. Advisers are split, with at least one citing internal polling suggesting a mass pardon could benefit the president politically, though any action is now described as unlikely by Independence Day.

The White House has confirmed ongoing discussions about carrying out Trump's priorities but says no decision has been made.

The Numbers in Context

Trump has already granted clemency more than 2,000 times across both terms, according to the legal analysis site lisa-legalinfo. On his first day back in office in January 2025, he pardoned nearly 1,500 people connected to the January 6 Capitol riot. Subsequent pardons have gone to individuals tied to his political movement and to wealthy campaign donors, drawing criticism from both sides of the aisle, per the Wall Street Journal.

For comparison, Biden issued a larger raw number of clemencies. Biden commuted sentences for people on home confinement under the CARES Act, pardoned marijuana convictions in bulk, and commuted death sentences of 38 of the 40 people on federal death row, changing those sentences to life in prison without chance of release. Biden also pardoned his son Hunter and members of his family, which generated significant political backlash.

The volume of formal pardon petitions has exploded. About 5,100 were filed in 2024. That number jumped to more than 16,150 in 2025, according to lisa-legalinfo. The DOJ's Office of Pardon Attorney stopped publicly reporting its pending backlog. The last available figure, from the end of March 2025, showed over 10,000 petitions pending before that year's surge arrived.

Crypto Founders Are Lobbying Hard

Among those pushing for inclusion in a potential mass pardon: crypto sector figures. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted on all seven counts tied to the collapse of his exchange and sentenced to 25 years in 2024, ran a social media campaign for clemency. Trump reportedly ruled that one out earlier this year, according to TradingView's report citing the Wall Street Journal.

Keonne Rodriguez, a developer behind the Samourai Wallet crypto-mixing protocol, has publicly asked for a pardon. Trump said last December he would review the case. A petition supporting Rodriguez had collected 16,082 signatures as of mid-May.

Several crypto figures have already received pardons in Trump's second term. BitMEX co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed were pardoned after pleading guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, who served a four-month sentence after pleading guilty to the same statute, was also pardoned in 2025. Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht received one of Trump's first pardons back in January 2025.

The Lobbying Machine

The strongest legitimate concern about this process is the one raised by people inside Trump's own orbit. A criminal-defense attorney described the clemency atmosphere to The Atlantic as "a three-ring circus." A former administration official called it "batshit crazy." One lobbyist said he started turning off his phone as client demands became "aggressive."

The concern isn't hypothetical. Slight proximity to Trump's circle has been monetized in the scramble for pardon consideration, according to multiple current and former administration officials and nine private-sector lawyers and lobbyists who spoke with The Atlantic on background. A former Trump associate described the current environment as fundamentally different from the first term: "Everything is now out in the open."

The appointment of Alice Marie Johnson as White House clemency czar has formalized some of this process, but formalization hasn't slowed the feeding frenzy.

The Fairness Argument

Supporters of broad clemency make a real case. The federal prison system holds people serving sentences that many legal reformers across the political spectrum consider disproportionate. St. Thomas School of Law Professor Mark Osler, described as a federal clemency expert by lisa-legalinfo, has studied the process for years and has argued that the pardon power is systematically underused. The idea that a president should exercise robust clemency, rather than leaving it as a bureaucratic afterthought, has genuine bipartisan backing in criminal justice reform circles. A president using the pardon power visibly and frequently is not, by itself, an abuse of it.

The legitimate debate is about who gets pardoned and why, not whether pardons should be issued at all.

What Comes Next

With July 4 now days away and the proposal still unresolved, the open question is whether Trump will announce something before or after the midterm elections this November. Some White House officials, per lisa-legalinfo, have expressed concern that a mass clemency announcement before November could carry political risk. Others floated June 14, Flag Day and Trump's birthday, as a possible announcement date. That date has passed without an announcement. The next logical window is July 4 itself, and then the calculation shifts to whether any action before midterms helps or hurts Republican candidates in competitive districts.