President Donald Trump has pardoned some top political allies, including his former personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and 76 others accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Late Sunday night, U.S. Department of Justice Pardon Attorney Ed Martin posted the acquittal on X, granting a “full, complete, and unconditional pardon” in connection to the election and for any “efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 presidential election.”
Other names highlighted in the pardon included Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff in 2020, U.S. attorney and former prosecutor Sidney Powell and attorney John Eastman, all of whom were entangled in the Georgia election subversion case, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in 2023.
Though she was disqualified from prosecuting the case last year, it has not been dismissed.
Many on the pardon list were charged in states like Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada, where Trump questioned election malpractice following the race that lost him the presidency to Joe Biden.
Tyler Bowyer, COO of Turning Point Action in Arizona, was also on the pardon list and thanked the Trump administration in an online post.
“We were targeted to sideline many of us politically,” he said on X. “It has nearly bankrupted and caused severe trauma to many good people on this list — this is why it is important to get to the bottom of what was carried out against good faith and active citizens who took to the courts to ask questions about the 2020 election.“
Bowyer added, “Trump was also indicted in the election case, but he was not on the pardon list. Whether a president has the power to pardon themselves or not remains untested and debated.”
Last year, Bowyer — who was one of the “fake” electors from Arizona — was on an indictment list with 17 others filed by the Arizona Attorney General for “preventing the lawful transfer of the presidency of the United States, keeping President Donald J. Trump in office against the will of Arizona voters, and depriving Arizona voters of their right to vote and have their votes counted under the United States Constitution.”
A spokesperson for the state’s attorney’s general office told ABC News the pardon would create “no impact on the state’s case.”
Not everyone sees the mass pardon as justice.
Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern posted on social media that this sends a different message:
“If you help the president try to steal an election, you’ll get a pardon.”
Giuliani told the New York Post that he was “surprised” by the pardon.
“President Trump ended a long nightmare for innocent people,” he said. “The president has made the justice system fair again. This pardon decision shows there were two justice systems.”
The former New York City mayor emphasized that the prosecution against the president and his allies in the last few years will “go down as the darkest chapter in our court system,” he said. “A lot of these electors who were indicted were regular people.”