Why not Madoff?
by digby
Apparently, Bernie Madoff has been hitting Trump up for a pardon too:
Bernie Madoff is asking that President Donald Trump reduce his 150-year prison sentence.… Madoff, who pleaded guilty to 11 crimes in 2009, is not asking for a pardon from the president. Instead, he is requesting clemency from Trump in the form of a sentence commutation, or reduction, according to an application filed with the Justice Department. A search of the Justice Department’s website shows that Madoff’s clemency request is “pending.”
It is not known if Trump will consider the request, or when he might do so. Madoff’s former lawyer, Ira Lee Sorkin, told CNBC he had no information about the request. The White House referred questions about Madoff’s bid for clemency to the Justice Department.
He believes his sentence was too long because it didn’t account for all the years he wasn’t swindling his clients. That’s just the kind of logic that could easily appeal to Trump. Trump believes any accountability for a right-winger or a rich guy is by definition “unfair.”
You would think the odds of Trump granting Madoff’s request are probably quite low, but given who we’re talking about, they’re definitely above zero percent! Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has issued 10 pardons that all neatly fit with his primary worldview as a Hillary Clinton–hating psychopath who thinks cheating is fine as long as the cheater is rich. Beneficiaries have included Kristian Saucier, who pleaded guilty to unauthorized possession and retention of national defense information, who argued at his sentencing that he should have received probation because Hillary Clinton didn’t go to jail for her own email scandal, which Trump obviously ate up. There was Scooter Libby, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, a topic extremely close to the president’s heart. There was Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who the Department of Justice said oversaw “the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history,” which, y’know. And of course, there was millionaire Conrad Black, who was convicted in 2007 of obstruction of justice and fraud. Black received his own pardon from Trump after writing a book last year called Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other, in which Black argued that “the great majority of anti-Trump activity in the first year of his administration was devoted to falsehoods,” and that Trump is not “a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior.”
This was written before his latest declaration about considering commuting Blagojevich’s sentence.
If only Madoff had been on The Apprentice, he’d be a shoo-in. But it’s not too late to write a book!
.