The Democrats are preparing a target list for after the midterms.
Democrats keep promising a blizzard of subpoenas.
And Donald Trump is weighing one answer Democrats can’t overrule.
The White House Lawyers Pulled Out the Pardon Pen
White House attorneys are studying whether President Trump should hand out mass pardons to junior staffers, according to two sources who spoke with The Washington Sun.
A pardon covering every low-level employee looks unlikely, one source told the outlet. But Trump could issue blanket pardons for everyone who worked in a particular policy area, such as deportations, war, or trade.
The Heritage Foundation and American Moment have pressed the White House counsel’s office to either prepare pardons or set aside money for the legal fees junior staffers would face from criminal probes, congressional investigations, or lawsuits, the Sun reported.
Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, skipped the diplomatic language entirely. “After listening to Elissa Slotkin threatening to go after young people who joined the Trump administration, President Trump should issue very broad preemptive pardons for anyone who worked for him or in his orbit,” Davis told the paper.
Trump had already dropped hints. Asked by Time magazine whether he’d pardon staffers, he answered, “Yeah, sure I’d do that,” and then pointed straight at his predecessor.
“Well, Sleepy Joe Biden, he gave pardons to everyone,” Trump said.
He sharpened the point in a Newsmax interview. “I don’t want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers and everything else, all for nothing,” Trump said.
Joe Biden Pardoned the Staffers First
The cable panels clutching their pearls over this story keep leaving out one detail.
In his final hours in office in January 2025, Joe Biden handed preemptive pardons to Anthony Fauci, retired Gen Mark Milley, and the members of the House January 6 Committee. He also covered the committee’s staff, along with the police officers who testified before it.
Read that list one more time. Biden reached past the Members of Congress and wrapped the aides who drafted the subpoenas and ran the hearings in the same blanket of protection.
Nobody had charged those staffers with anything. Biden pardoned them anyway, just in case a future administration came calling.
And the irony runs deep. The same party that treated January 6 as the crime of the century spent the summer of 2020 shrugging while rioters torched a Minneapolis police precinct and laid siege to a federal courthouse in Portland.
Mark Osler, a clemency expert at the University of St Thomas School of Law, doesn’t love the idea of Trump expanding the practice. But even he admitted to the Sun that “the Biden administration did this and blazed the trail.” Liz Oyer, Biden’s own pardon attorney, called her old boss’s preemptive pardons a “really bad precedent.”
So the left’s own experts concede who opened this door. Democrats only object now because a Republican might walk through it.
Slotkin, Jeffries, and AOC Keep Sharpening the Knives
US Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) lit the fuse earlier this month at a University of Chicago event, where she said she wanted to “not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him.”
Then she acted out the panic she hoped to plant in the head of every graduate eyeing a federal job. “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that,” Slotkin said.
She later insisted she only meant people who broke the law at Trump’s direction, writing that the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling “has not done the same for those who do illegal things at his behest.” But a senator doesn’t need a conviction to wreck a 24-year-old’s life. She just needs a subpoena and a calendar.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) promised in August, “We’re going to hold every single member of the Trump cartel accountable.” He followed up at a Brooklyn press conference, vowing that “beginning on Day 1, we’re going to hold the crooks accountable.”
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) laid out the battle plan at a recent town hall in Portland, Maine. “Day one, we need to be opening investigations into the heads of every single one of these agencies, and we need to hold them accountable,” she said. “I’m talking subpoenas. I’m talking investigations.”
And US Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) offered his own free advice to administration employees. “And if you committed an actual federal crime, that as long as the statute of limitations has not run, you should probably get a lawyer,” Schatz said.
Get a lawyer. Not relax, not sleep easy. Get a lawyer.
Michael Caputo Already Lived This Nightmare
Michael Caputo can tell any young staffer how this movie ends.
Caputo worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign, and the Russia collusion hoax swallowed him whole as a witness, never as a defendant. The House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Robert Mueller’s team all grilled him. By 2018, he pegged his legal bills at roughly $125,000, about $25,000 per hearing, and he launched a crowdfunding page to keep his family in East Aurora, New York.
Mueller never charged him. The bills showed up anyway.
Caputo was a seasoned political operator. Now picture a junior aide two years out of college, with student loans and a cramped apartment in Arlington, opening a letter from a Democrat committee chairman demanding years of text messages. A top Washington, DC defense lawyer can bill more for one hour than that kid takes home in a day.
Trump saw this coming back in his first term. In October 2017, the White House said he planned to spend at least $430,000 of his own money on legal bills for staff and campaign aides caught in the Russia probes.
Now, a pardon won’t fix everything, and it’s worth pumping the brakes for a second. A pardon covers federal crimes. It doesn’t stop a congressional subpoena, and a committee can still drag a pardoned aide in to testify, since the Fifth Amendment shield mostly disappears once the criminal exposure does.
That’s exactly why Heritage and American Moment want a legal-fee fund sitting next to the pardon pen.
But a pardon does pull the scariest weapon off the table. Without the threat of a prison cell, a congressional interview turns back into a nuisance instead of a family-ruining ordeal.
The Five-Year Clock Democrats Are Watching
Federal law gives prosecutors five years to bring most criminal charges. A staffer who processed a deportation order in the spring of 2025 stays in the crosshairs until 2030.
Any Democrat sworn in as President in January 2029 would inherit a Justice Department with plenty of time left on that clock. Schatz’s line about the statute of limitations wasn’t a slip. He was reading the calendar out loud.
Robert Weissman of Public Citizen told the Sun that an impartial Justice Department would examine, among other things, the administration’s treatment of immigrants. Voters handed Trump a mandate to remove illegal aliens in 2024. Democrats want to turn the people who carried out that mandate into defendants.
Nick Solheim of American Moment summed up the stakes, telling the Sun that “the left will do everything in its power to hunt down conservatives who are implementing the president’s agenda.”
Slotkin wants graduates to look at a Trump job and see a lifetime of legal bills. A pardon flips that math.
Michael Caputo put the whole racket into one sentence back in 2018: “Making Buffalo money, I can’t pay Washington legal fees.”
Sources: Mediaite, “Trump Admin ‘Evaluating’ Mass Pardons for Junior Staffers: Report”; The Washington Sun, “White House Is Weighing Mass Pardons for Junior Staff”; Raw Story; The National News Desk, “Sen. Slotkin says she wants prosecutions to deter graduates from working for Trump admin”; HuffPost; UPI; NewsNation; NBC News; CNBC; CNN; WGRZ; Associated Press/PBS NewsHour