Editor’s Note: What would the sharpest critics of the past make of today’s political theater? To find out, we used artificial intelligence to imagine how historical commentators would review current events. What follows opens with additional documented facts about the presidential pardon economy, followed by an AI-generated commentary in the cynical, unmistakable voice of H.L. Mencken.
The Presidential Pardon Economy: Additional Facts, and a Commentary in the Style of H.L. Mencken
Additional Facts Confirming and Extending the Original Fact-Check
On Boosie Badazz’s $600,000 deal. The contract with lobbyists Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl of JM Burkman & Associates was signed September 30, 2025, and contained a refund clause: if no pardon materialized by “close of business” on January 31 (the date written was 2025, but both sides agree the intended year was 2026), Hatch could claim back half the fee, or $300,000. On New Year’s Day 2026, Hatch’s attorney was told the pair claimed a pardon had already been signed by Trump. It hadn’t. A White House official later told reporters the clemency team had “never heard from” Wohl or Burkman and that their involvement would likely have hurt, not helped, Hatch’s chances. Burkman and Wohl have so far refused the refund, citing cost overruns. The case is before the American Arbitration Association. (Sources: NOTUS, TMZ, Billboard, The Advocate.)
On the NOTUS/NPR segment. The July 19, 2026 Weekend Edition Sunday interview, syndicated across NPR member stations, quoted reporter Jasmine Wright explaining that because normal DOJ vetting has been sidestepped, well-connected lawyers and lobbyists now charge clients anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars up to $5 million to advocate directly to the White House for clemency. Wright noted a legal nuance: paying for advocacy is not illegal — clients are technically paying for lobbying access, not the pardon itself, which keeps the arrangement inside a gray zone rather than outright bribery.
On Ed Martin. Martin’s marginalization is broader than pardon-office politics. Before being narrowed to pardon-attorney duties, he led the DOJ’s “Weaponization Working Group” targeting Trump’s political opponents. Reporting from CNN, NBC News, and MSNBC’s ms.now indicates he was pushed out after a feud with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and findings that he leaked grand jury material from politically sensitive investigations (including those touching Adam Schiff and Letitia James). He no longer works out of DOJ headquarters, having been relocated to a satellite building. Separately, the D.C. Bar opened disciplinary proceedings against him over allegations he improperly threatened Georgetown Law’s federal funding. One legal-affairs newsletter (Legal Information Services Associates) described the Pardon Attorney’s office by March 2026 as “totally decimated” and functionally bypassed by a “corrupt” clemency process.
On the January 6 pardons. The January 20, 2025 proclamation covered close to 1,600 people (reporting varies between “roughly 1,500” and “nearly 1,600”): the great majority received full pardons, while 14 members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — including former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, previously sentenced to 22 years — had their sentences commuted rather than pardoned outright. More than 600 of the pardoned or commuted defendants had been convicted of or pleaded guilty to assaulting or obstructing law enforcement; 170 involved a deadly weapon.
On the Lawfare/NYT recidivism findings. The June 2026 Lawfare analysis put the number of pardonees subsequently charged with other crimes at 97 — roughly 1 in 16 of all Jan. 6 clemency recipients. Offenses ranged from minor property crimes to grand larceny, stalking, fraud against government agencies, and plots to assassinate law enforcement officers and politicians. The analysis documented 14 instances involving sex crimes or child sexual abuse material and at least six domestic violence cases. The New York Times isolated 12 of these as “serious recidivists” — those convicted of offenses including child molestation, assault, harassment, murder plots, and a case involving a vicious dog attack. One pardonee was convicted in February 2026 of child molestation and sentenced to life in prison.
The Pardon Trust: A Democracy Monetizes Its Mercy
A commentary in the manner of H.L. Mencken
(A stylistic pastiche — not a historical document. Mencken died in 1956; this imagines the voice he might have brought to 2026.)
There is, in the government of these United States, an ancient and lovely fiction called executive clemency, under which the man at the top of the pyramid — chosen, in theory, by the sovereign people, and answerable, in theory, to their notions of justice — may reach down and lift some wretch out of the machinery of the law, on the theory that mercy, being a Christian virtue, ought occasionally to be exercised by men who otherwise resemble Christians only in their taste for sanctimony. It has always been a racket, in the sense that all clemency is arbitrary and all arbitrary power invites the friends of power to come calling with their hats in their hands and their checkbooks in their pockets. What is new, and what does the Republic credit for its remarkable candor, is that the racket has now been organized, priced, and put out to market with all the dignity of a Sears catalogue.
Consider the case of Torence Hatch, who performs under the name Boosie Badazz, and who paid two Washington operators named Burkman and Wohl the tidy sum of $600,000 for a document bearing the President’s signature. The document did not arrive. Hatch is now before an arbitration panel, demanding his $300,000 back under a refund clause that a more innocent age would have called a warranty. One admires the commercial sophistication of it — a pardon, it turns out, now comes with terms and conditions, like a blender. The White House, asked about the transaction, disclaimed all knowledge of the two gentlemen, which is precisely what a White House would say whether it knew them intimately or not at all, and which therefore tells us nothing except that the office of the presidency has become, among certain circles, indistinguishable from a bucket shop.
The reporter Jasmine Wright, interviewing on the government radio for the edification of the surviving literate classes, put a figure on the going rate: up to five million dollars, for the right lawyer, to whisper into the right ear. She was careful — as reporters must be, lest the libel bar descend upon them — to note that none of this is technically illegal, since the client is paying only for advocacy, not for the pardon itself, a distinction that will strike the plain man as the same sort of distinction his bookmaker draws between “advising” him on a horse and “guaranteeing” the race. The old Pardon Attorney’s office, which once required a man to show remorse, restitution, and the patience to wait out his sentence like a gentleman, has been quietly demoted to ornamental status; its most recent occupant, one Ed Martin, arrived by way of investigating the President’s enemies, was found to have leaked grand jury secrets for his trouble, was exiled to an annex building, and is now, so far as anyone can tell, occupied chiefly with paperwork nobody important reads. This is what in the private sector would be called kicking a man upstairs; in the public sector it is called reform.
And what has all this democratized mercy produced? By the government’s own count, of the nearly sixteen hundred souls swept up in the blanket pardon of the Capitol rioters — a pardon issued, with a flourish, on the very first day of the new administration, as though justice itself were a inaugural parade float — very nearly a hundred have since been rearrested for fresh crimes, a baker’s dozen of them for offenses so far beyond ordinary human cussedness that even the New York Times, not an organ given to purple prose, felt obliged to use the word “serious”: child molestation, murder plots, a dog set loose upon a fellow citizen. One of these forgiven men has since been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a cell, which suggests that the pardon he received on January 20th bought him, at most, a brief furlough from justice rather than an acquittal from Providence.
The moralists will call this a scandal, and they will not be wrong, though they will miss what is actually funny about it, which is that the thing has been running in plain sight the entire time, defended by men who could not, under torture, explain how it differs from what they spent a decade denouncing in the capitals of lesser republics. The pardon power was always a king’s leftover, a bit of medieval upholstery the Framers forgot to strip out of the government they were building; it is no surprise that it has now found its natural level, which is the marketplace, where everything in America eventually goes to be priced. The wonder is not that the pardon economy exists. The wonder is that anyone still affects surprise at the bill.
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