Trump’s insane pardons are killing any faint flicker of justice in America

The Oglala Sioux, and the historic Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota where many tribal members still live, have often witnessed the American government on its worst behavior. Pine Ridge is home to Wounded Knee, where in 1890 U.S. Army troops, fueled by settlers’ racist fears of a Sioux resurgence, massacred roughly 300 of the Lakota, and where in 1973 the modern-day American Indian Movement faced its own blood-soaked climax.

It probably won’t shock you to learn President Donald Trump has not been a friend to the Oglala Sioux or the other Indigenous Americans living in the Dakotas. One of the first acts of his first term in 2017 was to ram through approval for the Dakota Access Pipeline despite months of contentious protests by Native American residents that the government had no right to risk polluting their hallowed lands.

Now, Trump’s latest act is adding insult to centuries of injury for the Oglala Sioux.

The story of this newest outrage starts in 2015, when a group of slick investors arrived at Pine Ridge to pitch leaders of the Oglala Nation on an economic development plan for what stubbornly remains one of the poorest counties in the United States. The backers of a planned bond sale to benefit the reservation included Devon Archer, who, at the same time, was a partner on other deals with Hunter Biden, son of the then-vice president.

The beleaguered Oglala Sioux never reaped a dime from what federal prosecutors soon charged was a swindle from the start. A 2016 indictment alleged the group defrauded its investors, as some partners used the proceeds for fancy cars and jewelry, while Archer was accused of using some of the cash for propping up his other ventures. His 2018 conviction on securities fraud charges led to a one-year prison sentence and an order to pay $43 million in restitution, triggering a seven-year legal battle to avoid the penalties — and some major changes for Archer.

When, according to reporting by the New York Times, the Biden family ignored pleas for a pardon and froze Archer out upon Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House in 2021, he became a whistleblower against Hunter Biden. He eagerly worked with Trump allies, Republicans on Capitol Hill, and right-wing journalists by offering dirt on Hunter Biden.

The now-47th president was clearly impressed by Archer’s flip-flop. On Tuesday, Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon for Archer, bypassing the once-traditional U.S. Justice Department review process that judges such quaint notions as contrition or good works. Neither the Oglala Sioux nor their duped investors will see any justice in the case. Said Archer: “I’m full MAGA now. They’re more my people.”

This case of presidential mercy for an alleged swindler turned political ally may not even have been the worst travesty of injustice in a week when Trump — while the Beltway media was almost solely focused on a different scandal, around the accidental leak of Yemen attack plans over the Signal app — went off on a little-noticed pardon spree for his friends and a big-time donor:

“They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for a president,” the president told reporters in justifying the pardon. “He supported Trump. He liked Trump.” Milton posted a video to his X social media account: “I am free. The prosecutors can no longer hurt me.”

A former prosecutor told the Los Angeles Times that the firing of Adam Schleifer is “going to have an incredible chilling effect on any line federal prosecutor who is thinking about criminally investigating or prosecuting an executive of any company of any significance.” He added: “The message from Adam’s case is that if you’re going to indict some run-of-the-mill CEO of a company, you need to check if he’s a Trump supporter first.”

Let’s take a step back from this white-collar crime spree and look at the big picture, which is a little shocking. Trump’s first major act as 47th president of pardoning roughly 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, even those who violently attacked police officers — on top of Trump’s success in evading any real accountability for his own four felony indictments — has clearly anesthetized the public to a catastrophic failure of the U.S. justice system.

The unrestricted power of the presidency to grant full mercy for federal crimes has always posed the potential for abuse, and on a much smaller scale, it has arguably been misused by both Republican and Democratic past presidents. But this was before the U.S. Supreme Court last year barred prosecuting presidents for their official acts, which includes any grants of clemency. Under that ruling, a convicted white-collar criminal could hand Trump a briefcase with $1 billion in cash in return for a pardon, and the president remains immune from prosecution. This is the power of a king, and Trump is wielding this authority, tyrannically.

In Trump’s America, the con artist behind his own scams — from Trump University to the presidential meme coin — has also decided to create a perpetual The Purge of no punishment for any kind of white-collar fraud — even, or especially, against people like the long-oppressed Oglala Sioux. All that matters is the perps pledge their fealty, and hopefully wads of cash, to His Highness, our strongman president.

Let’s be honest: American justice was already on life support before Trump returned on Jan. 20 — with wrist slaps or less for the high-powered crooks of Wall Street, and the world’s highest rate of mass incarceration for, well, the masses. But Trump has obliterated any lingering hope for fairness.

So I guess we can just disband or at least downsize the Justice Department, the FBI, and related law enforcement agencies, since so many laws are no longer even being enforced. Except instead the power of the state is being radically repurposed, and not for good.

It’s difficult to say which of these is worse: Is it the vows by MAGA loyalists like the Jan. 6 rally speaker Ed Martin — somehow planted as the mega-powerful interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. — to prosecute politicians or activists for no crime other than criticizing Trump or his apparent copresident, Elon Musk? This seems just the leading edge of Trump’s promise of retribution against any and all perceived political enemies.

Or is it the crude justice that Trump World is already meting out to more politically unpopular and legally vulnerable critics, including international university students who’ve protested for Palestinians since the war in Gaza started in 2023? At virtually the same moment convicted EV fraudster Milton was driving on the open road bragging that “I’m free,” masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were grabbing Tufts University grad student Rumeysa Ozturk off a Massachusetts street and flying her to a notorious prison in Louisiana. This despite a lack of evidence that she’s committed any crime, but instead came under scrutiny for coauthoring an innocuous pro-Palestinian op-ed.

Once upon a time, the dream of equal justice under the law was a main ingredient in the beaker of a glorious American Experiment in democracy. Today, we are an autocracy, where white-collar thugs and their monarchical sponsor are untouchable, while secret police are nabbing legal residents for the thought crime of an op-ed in a college newspaper. And the Trump regime is just getting started. When we’re already numb to this latest assault on the Oglala Sioux, imagine what future injustices await those who dare to fight a dictatorship on U.S. soil.