Dec. 22 (UPI) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a flurry of 20 pardons and commutations as his term in the White House comes to an end.
The pardons issued Tuesday include two men who pleaded guilty in former special counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, two former Republican congressmen and four former Blackwater Worldwide military contractors responsible for the shooting deaths of 14 Iraqis in 2007.
George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was pardoned after pleading guilty to making false statements to federal officials as part of Mueller’s investigation.
Trump also pardoned Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer who pleaded guilty to the same charge in 2018.
Former California Rep. Duncan Hunter received a pardon after he and his wife, Margaret Hunter, pleaded guilty last year to misusing more than $250,000 of his campaign re-election funds for personal expenses such as video games, private school tuition, oral surgery and utilities between 2009 and 2016.
Additionally, former New York Rep. Chris Collins was pardoned after pleading guilty in October 2019 to insider trading for telling his son Cameron Collins and Stephen Zarsky — Cameron Collins’ prospective father-in-law — to sell their shares in Australian biotech firm Innate Immunotherapeutics as the company failed a clinical trial.
Trump also pardoned Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Nicholas Slaten, four former employees of the military contracting firm Blackwater Worldwide who were sentenced for their roles in a massacre in Iraq in 2007 that resulted in the deaths of 14 unarmed Iraqis.
Earlier this year, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime ally and former campaign adviser Roger Stone and last month, following his election loss, he pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
