The pardon power
Full pardons of convicted individuals, Clinton to present
Full pardons only, complete forgiveness that erases a federal conviction, granted to people actually charged or convicted of crimes. Commutations (sentence reductions) and preemptive pardons of uncharged people are excluded. Each bar splits into routine grants and grants to people with a personal, political, financial, or service relationship to the president.
What “connected” means
A pardon is classified as connected when the recipient had at least one of these relationships to the president who granted it:
- Family, e.g., Roger Clinton (the president's brother), Charles Kushner (the president's son-in-law's father), Hunter Biden (the president's son).
- Staff, political allies, and campaign figures, e.g., Michael Flynn (National Security Advisor), Steve Bannon (chief strategist), Roger Stone and Paul Manafort (convicted in the investigation of the president's own campaign; their pardons also rewarded non-cooperation with prosecutors).
- Financial orbit, donors or people whose business dealings intersect the president's: Marc Rich (whose ex-wife donated ~$450,000 to the Clinton library, with the pardon bypassing DOJ entirely); Changpeng Zhao (Binance, which had done a ~$2B transaction involving the Trump family's crypto venture).
- Offenses committed in the president's political service, the ~1,500 January 6 defendants, whose crimes were carried out at the president's rally, in his name, to keep him in office. This category is the whole of the largest orange block.
What is not counted: mercy for strangers, however controversial. Obama's and Biden's mass drug-sentence clemency, and the ordinary DOJ-processed pardons of every presidency, are routine (gray), criticism of a grant is not the same as connection to the president.
What the filters removed
Commutations (sentence reductions that leave the conviction standing): this deletes Obama's ~1,715 and Biden's ~4,165 drug-sentence commutations, the bulk of their clemency, and also removes the 14 January 6 defendants (Stewart Rhodes among them) whose sentences were commuted, not pardoned (one of them, Thomas Caldwell, later received a full pardon, in March 2025); the Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, by contrast, received a full pardon and is counted in the bar. Also excluded: corporate pardons, eight on the Justice Department's list through July 2026, starting with BitMEX's operator, HDR Global Trading (March 2025, after a $100M fine), and including six companies in one July 2026 batch, since organizations are not convicted individuals.
Preemptive pardons of uncharged people: Ford's pardon of Nixon, Biden's pardons of five family members, Fauci, Milley, and the Jan. 6 committee, and Trump's 2025 fake-elector mass pardon (its 77 named recipients, including Giuliani and Meadows, faced state charges a federal pardon cannot reach, not federal ones). Note this filter removes each president's most norm-contested shield pardons, a categorically different act from forgiving the convicted.
Confidence and contestable calls
Connected counts are estimates built on watchdog tallies (Lawfare, Protect Democracy) and DOJ process data, only ~25 of Trump I's 238 clemency acts went through the normal Office of the Pardon Attorney process. Treat Trump I's split as ±20% and retail counts elsewhere as ±a few dozen.
Genuinely disputable edges: Blagojevich (celebrity acquaintance, no real tie) is marginal; Ross Ulbricht (no personal tie, but a pardon promised to a funding constituency) is counted gray here and a stricter analyst would flip him; supporters classify the Jan. 6 pardons as correcting politicized prosecutions rather than rewarding allies, a moral reading this chart does not adjudicate. It records the factual relationship only: people punished for acting in the president's cause, forgiven by him.
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Summary
In the Clinton-to-present window, the routine pardon quietly atrophied, from Clinton's ~396 down era by era to Biden's 72, while connected pardons stayed in the single digits to low teens for every president, with Clinton's last-day batch (Marc Rich, his brother) the old-era high-water mark at roughly fifteen.
Two events break the pattern, both Trump's. His first term set the proportional record: only 144 pardons, but roughly four in five connected, the first presidency in which the pardon power was used chiefly for the president's own circle. His second term set the absolute record: ~1,690 pardons of convicted individuals in under two years, roughly 1,500 of them a single connected act, the January 6 blanket, covering hundreds convicted of assaulting or resisting police. No defensible reclassification of the disputed edge cases changes the shape: every other modern president sits between one and ~15 connected pardons; the two Trump terms sit at roughly 118 and roughly 1,500.
One framing disclosure: cropping at Clinton removes the historical precedent for high-volume pardoning (Nixon ~863, Carter ~534, routine civil-rights restorations of an earlier era). What is unprecedented in any window is not the volume but the composition: a shift from majority-routine to majority-connected pardons, concentrated in two of the six terms shown.