The fake-electors pardon: clemency for an election-subversion scheme the president benefited from

Editor's note: the president's own signed pardon proclamation covers the people who acted for him in the 2020 elector slates, the documented return to him.

On November 9, 2025, Pardon Attorney Ed Martin posted online a signed presidential proclamation, dated November 7 (Proclamation 10989), granting 'a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential electors' in the 2020 election. It names 77 people, among them Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn, Jeffrey Clark, and Arizona fake electors Kelli and Michael Ward. It states: 'This pardon does not apply to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.'

The proclamation says it 'ends a grave national injustice' and 'continues the process of national reconciliation.' It extends federal clemency rather than erasing any pending case: none of the Trump allies named had been charged in federal cases over the 2020 election, so the pardons are largely symbolic. Pardons reach only federal crimes, so state cases in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin are beyond the federal pardon power. Votebeat reported in November 2025 that Michigan's charges against the remaining 15 defendants had been dismissed in September, and that Nevada's case had been dismissed before the 2024 election for being brought in the wrong county.

The Brennan Center's Sean Morales-Doyle said the pardon changes the calculus for would-be election subverters: 'people who might be tempted to try to challenge legitimate outcomes and subvert the outcomes of elections have to think about the consequences of doing that and this changes the set of outcomes they may face.' The pardon protects participants in an attack on the process by which election results are certified, a scheme whose direct beneficiary would have been the president himself.