Thirty People Got Clemency. The White House Named Four of Them.

On September 3, the President signed roughly thirty acts of clemency — a mix of pardons, which erase the conviction, and commutations, which leave the conviction in place and just cut the sentence short. The normal way the country finds out about this is a list. Not a ceremony, not a press conference. A boring document with names on it, posted somewhere reporters can find it.

This time the announcement was a post on X from Alice Marie Johnson, the administration’s “pardon czar,” which is a real job title that a real person types on real forms. She named four people.

The other two dozen or so surfaced the way you find out a neighbor got divorced: in pieces, from people with a reason to talk. Second Amendment groups announced a few of their guys. A marijuana policy outlet turned up two more. Defense attorneys mentioned clients. Liz Oyer — the former federal pardon attorney, meaning she used to run the Justice Department office that reviews these petitions — wrote the whole thing up under a headline calling them secret pardons, which is about the least ambiguous framing available.

One name in the unannounced pile scrambles the usual political wiring, and it’s the one that matters most.

John Dougherty — “Johnny Doc” — ran Local 98 of the electricians’ union in Philadelphia for nearly thirty years and was one of the most powerful Democratic operators in Pennsylvania, steering tens of millions in union money toward candidates he liked. In 2023 he was convicted of bribing a city councilman and of embezzling roughly $600,000 from his own members. In 2024 he got six years. He had served about two.

Trump commuted the sentence. The conviction stands, but he walks — no house arrest, no monitoring. And the roughly $1.6 million in restitution he owed back to the union he stole from was wiped out along with it.

The stated reason, according to reporting on the grant, is that his wife is terminally ill and he was needed at home; his attorney has said the person who had been caring for her, her father, recently died. That may be entirely true. If it is, it’s a genuine human situation and a legitimate thing for a president to weigh. Compassionate release exists precisely because sometimes the humane answer and the sentencing guidelines don’t match.

But compassion for a dying woman does not require canceling $1.6 million owed to a few thousand electricians who are not dying and did not steal anything. Those were two separate decisions made in the same document, and only one of them came with an explanation. The members of Local 98 are the actual victims in this case — the money was theirs, out of their dues — and they learned they weren’t getting it back from the news.

The timing is worth sitting with. In July, the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney — the career staff who read the file and make a recommendation — denied Dougherty’s clemency petition. Two months later he got it anyway. That is completely legal. The president’s clemency power doesn’t require DOJ’s blessing and never has; the review process is a filter, not a gate. But the filter exists so that somebody with no stake in the outcome reads the file before the favor gets done. When the career answer is no and the grant happens regardless, the obvious question is who made the case the second time, and to whom. You can’t find out, because there is no public paperwork. One outlet noted that the Pardon Attorney’s own website still hadn’t been updated to show the commutation while Dougherty was already home.

To be fair about the rest of the batch: a fair amount of it looks defensible, at least from what’s been dragged into daylight. There’s a man who did more than a decade on a crack cocaine case, the kind of sentence a bipartisan majority in Congress decided was too long when it passed the First Step Act. Two men were finishing marijuana trafficking sentences in a country where most states now sell the stuff in strip malls next to a Verizon store. Several men were convicted under federal gun statutes that gun-rights organizations have been challenging for years. You can argue any of those, in either direction, at length. That’s the whole point. You can argue them because you have the names.

Nobody can argue the ones nobody has.

Here is the part that outlasts this particular story. The pardon power has no appeal, no judicial review, and no congressional override. It is the single most unchecked authority an American president holds, by design — the framers wanted mercy to be fast and personal. The only restraint that has ever applied to it is publicity. You publish the list, reporters go through it, and if you sprung a donor or somebody who could have testified against you, you eat a week of coverage. Embarrassment is the entire enforcement mechanism. Trump has now granted clemency to well over a thousand people since January 2025, most of them in the mass January 6 grant on his first day back, and the disclosure practice on this month’s batch was a social media post with four names in it.

If the answer is that all thirty were righteous, the fix is free and takes an intern an afternoon: post the list. Every administration before this one managed it. Until somebody does, the working assumption about the missing names has to be that somebody in the building read them and decided they’d land badly — and a few thousand electricians who are out $1.6 million are a decent preview of how.