The corruption is not universally popular.

Donald Trump’s unprecedented pardoning spree for political and business friends since returning to the White House has prompted warnings from ex-prosecutors and legal scholars of “corrupt” pay-to-play schemes, conflicts of interest and blatant partisanship.

It has included hundreds of Maga allies, a cryptocurrency mogul with ties to a Trump family crypto firm, disgraced politicians, and others who could yield political and financial benefits.

Other than that it’s totally aboveboard.

Recently, Trump has sparked strong criticism for commutations or pardons that seem increasingly aimed at boosting political allies and some Trump family business interests, say legal experts and ex-prosecutors.

Last month, Trump commuted a seven-year sentence of expelled House member George Santos, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to 13 counts including fraud and identity theft and had only served a few months.

Trump fueled more criticism last month when he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the multibillionaire who founded Binance, a huge crypto exchange that earlier this year inked a $2bn investment deal involving the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial that is expected to yield tens of millions yearly to the Trump family.

Now why would anyone criticize that?

“The corruption of the pardon process is one of the less visible but nevertheless important aspects of Trump’s sullying of the Justice Department,” said Philip Lacovara, who was counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor.

Lacovara called the commutation of Santos’ sentence after only a few months in prison “bewildering”. He stressed that Santos “never exhibited any remorse for his chain of frauds, and his sentence was well within the federal guidelines for his crimes”.

It’s not bewildering when you remember it was Trump who did it. This is who he is: a guy who considers fraud a smart way to get money.

Other legal experts see Trump’s pardon abuses as akin to a “form of bribery”.

“The pardon process as a method for granting executive grace for deserving criminal defendants has been replaced by a pay-to-play system that is a thinly disguised form of bribery,” said former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich.

Very very very thinly. So thinly you can’t really see it.