Trump’s Jaw-Dropping Blanket Pardons Offer to Goons Leaks
The president has floated a plan for protecting his staffers from congressional investigations or prosecution.
Elizabeth Frantz/Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
President Donald Trump has “repeatedly” mentioned sweeping pardons for his army of White House goons, insiders tell the Wall Street Journal.
“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval,” Trump said in a recent meeting, according to people with knowledge of the comments who spoke to the Journal.
Sources told the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that Trump has also said he plans to pardon anyone who has come within 10 feet of the executive residence.
In another meeting at the White House, Trump allegedly said he would hold a news conference and announce mass pardons before leaving office—something he did not do in the dying days of his first term. Some of his former advisers, like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, were later sentenced to stints in federal prison.
A preemptive pardon likely would have kept Peter Navarro out of federal prison. Instead, he spent four months in the clink for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Trump, 79, has mentioned pardons when White House staffers have “suggested they could face prosecution or congressional investigations over decisions,” sources told the Journal.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Journal that it should learn how to take a joke—but did not deny its reporting.
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“The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke, however, the President’s pardon power is absolute,” she said.
The Journal’s sources did not single out any aides who are ripe for a presidential pardon, but Karoline Leavitt has been in the president’s inner circle since his 2024 campaign.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for further comment.
Trump has wielded his power of the pardon early and often in MAGA 2.0. On day one, he wiped away criminal charges for some 1,600 Jan. 6 rioters—though a handful of them have found their way back into prisons for unrelated crimes, including child pornography.
The president also pardoned Binance founder and cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty in 2023 for violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws, as well as former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who the DOJ said was at the center of one of the “largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.
Former President Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons on his way out the door in early 2025, including to his immediate family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and the lawmakers on the House committee who investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
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