Donald Trump pardon recipient gets sent to prison anyway

| 3:00 pm EST February 18, 2023
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Since Donald Trump left office, the federal criminal justice process has done its usual thing of slowly and incrementally playing out. No one likes how lengthy and complex of a process it is, but all along we’ve seen steady concrete signs that it’s been moving forward. In fact it’s becoming obvious that DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith is gearing up to criminally indict Trump himself on a number of charges.

But dutifully documenting slow and steady progress isn’t any way for the major media outlets to hit their ratings marks. And so we’ve been subjected to a series of defeatist buzz phrases, over and over, that we’ve been conditioned to believe have somehow magically gotten everybody off the legal hook. These are terms like executive privilege, running out the clock, and of course PARDONS!

After Trump lost and began pardoning some of his criminal pals, we were told that it meant these folks had gotten away with it all for sure. Of course nothing is ever that simplistic. And in a reminder that things simply don’t work that way, many of the people Trump pardoned are right back under federal criminal investigation, while others have even subsequently been convicted on new charges.

Take for instance a Rand Paul adviser named Jesse Benton, who was pardoned by Donald Trump for his role in a 2012 bribery plot. Why did Paul work to get Trump to pardon this guy, and why did Trump agree to do it? We may have gotten that answer in late 2021, when the DOJ indicted Benton for having illegally funneled Russian money into the Trump 2016 campaign. Benton ended up being convicted this past November, and this week he was sentenced to prison.

In other words, even after Trump pardoned this guy, the DOJ managed to find something else to convict him on, and now he’s off to prison. In the end there were no magic wands. There was no running out the clock. It took time, but this guy is now going to prison, like he should have in the first place.

It’s a reminder that there are never any magic wands on either side. The DOJ wasn’t able to instantly turn around and lock this guy up the minute Trump was out of the way. But in the end the DOJ managed to nail him.

It’s also a reminder that when it comes to the folks who like to yell “If this or that Trump era person hasn’t been locked up by now they never will be,” they truly have no idea what they’re talking about. Nothing comes within a million miles of being that simplistic. There’s obviously plenty more work to be done, but there’s every reason to conclude that that work is indeed being done. Just as this has ended up with Jesse Benton in prison, it’s going to end up with Donald Trump in prison. It’s the path we’ve steadily been on since Trump left office, and it’s now more clear than ever.