Sarah Fitzpatrick

Presidents have generally treated their pardon power like an embarrassing secret, closely held among only a few trusted aides and exercised quietly in the final days of an administration. Some have signed clemency warrants just hours before boarding Marine One for their final flight.
But not Donald Trump.
Since returning to the White House for his second term, Trump has wielded his authority to grant clemency with abandon.

One of J. Edgar Hoover’s greatest reforms at the FBI was his embrace of fingerprinting. During the 1930s, visitors to the FBI offices in Washington, D.C., received souvenir fingerprint cards featuring his name. The men who succeeded him as FBI director were more discreet and judicious, mindful of the cult of personality that had developed around Hoover. They generally avoided giving out branded swag.
But then came Kash Patel.

On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log into an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.

One of Pete Hegseth’s first actions after taking charge at the Pentagon was to fire top lawyers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force—senior officers who the defense secretary said functioned as “roadblocks” to the president’s orders. The former National Guardsman has a history of hostility toward military lawyers and the legal restraints they impose on the use of military might. They are known as judge advocates general. Hegseth calls them “jagoffs.

Nearly two years ago, Donald Trump kicked off the presidential-campaign season with a declaration: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island,” he posted on Truth Social in January 2024. Reports to the contrary, he insisted, were the fault of AI—and of his political rivals: “This is what the Democrats do to their Republican Opponent, who is leading them, by a lot, in the Polls.

Jeffrey Epstein’s victims began the day believing they might finally get something they’d been requesting for years: a direct conversation with the nation’s top law-enforcement official before the Justice Department made public a full trove of long-buried documents and photos.