Trump Rewards Another Stooge With Pardon, This Time MAGA Rep’s Husband

Donald Trump has pardoned another criminal tied to his administration.

The president wiped the criminal slate Monday of Bob Harshbarger, who pleaded guilty in 2013 to health care fraud and the distribution of unauthorized Chinese drugs. Harshbarger is married to one of Trump’s congressional allies, Tennessee MAGA Representative Diana Harshbarger.

The pardon was not announced, but rather appeared on the White House website Monday.

An unidentified White House official told The New York Times that Bob Harshbarger was not granted the pardon because of his last name or for his affiliations. But Trump has been very vocal with his praise for Diana Harshbarger, endorsing the Tennessee lawmaker as an “unapologetic conservative Trump Republican.”

Trump’s use of the presidential pardon to free his friends and associates is “unprecedented” and “damaging to the rule of law,” according to at least one former Justice Department pardon attorney.

Liz Oyer told The Bulwark’s podcast Monday that she was “gobsmacked” by Trump’s recent choices on whom to pardon, including crypto billionaire and Binance exchange co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who was sentenced to four months in prison last year on charges related to money laundering.

Zhao and Trump’s family are financially tied. The presidential family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, has generated some $4.5 billion since the 2024 election thanks in large part to a partnership with PancakeSwap, an online exchange platform administered by Binance, The Wall Street Journal reported in August.

Last month, Trump publicly played dumb about Zhao, claiming he couldn’t recall the name of the person he had pardoned the day before.

“So that was truly stunning, and then even more stunning to hear the president claim on national television that he doesn’t know who this is,” Oyer said. “It was just a very bizarre moment.”

Another recent controversial pick, according to Oyer, was former Republican Representative George Santos, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for a litany of crimes before his detention was commuted by Trump for no clear reason other than the prolific fraudster’s undying loyalty to the president.

“Trump pardons a lot of people in whom he sees something of himself,” Oyer told The Bulwark.

Oyer also blasted Ed Martin, her successor as the DOJ’s pardon attorney, as someone “who does not even seem to have a basic understanding of how the Constitution works, how pardon power works, how federal law works, how the Justice Department works.”

Martin “is not a serious lawyer,” Oyer said.

The president issued a tsunami of pardons Friday for his alleged co-conspirators in the Georgia election interference case, including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Boris Epshteyn, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, and 72 others tied to the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

Martin shared details of the pardon on his personal X account Sunday night, replying to a post he made in May that read: “No MAGA left behind.”

It’s unclear, however, exactly how impactful Trump’s pardons will be for the presidential election conspiracy cronies, none of whom were charged with federal crimes.

Amid Donald Trump’s pardons of his fellow Republicans and corrupt business figures, one child sex predator has gotten a clean slate.

Andrew Taake, who was serving time for taking part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, benefited from Trump’s broad pardons in two ways thanks to an unusual deal first reported by The Daily Beast.

Taake was convicted of attacking a police officer at the Capitol with bear spray and a whip during the riots. He had also previously been charged in Harris County, Texas, with sending explicit photos and messages to someone who he thought was a 15-year-old girl, and he was out on bond when he took part in the riots. The “girl” on the Plenty of Fish dating site Taake was communicating with was an undercover police officer, and he didn’t stop messaging her after learning her age.

But thanks to the time he served for January 6 before Trump’s pardon, most of which was in pretrial detention, Taake accrued about three years and seven months of “credit,” for his earlier sex crimes, according to Harris County court documents. Taake was only sentenced for his crimes at the Capitol last summer, and thanks to Trump’s blanket pardon, was released from the federal ADX Florence supermax prison in January just months into his six-year term.

Taake was held in pretrial detention between his arrest and sentencing because of how violent his crimes were. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols called his part in the Capitol insurrection “the farthest thing from First Amendment expression.” In his sentencing memorandum last year, prosecutors said Taake “has not exhibited an ounce of remorse for his actions, nor accepted responsibility—going so far as to deny responsibility even after his guilty plea.”

Now Taake walks free, not just for his violent actions for Trump in D.C. but also for being a convicted child sex predator. One wonders if Trump knows about Taake or how he feels about him, considering that the president was found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll two years ago, and has numerous other sexual assault allegations against him.

Americans have lost so much faith in their government that they trust Congress less than they trust Immigration and Customs Enforcement—an organization already hated by the majority of the country.

New polling from the Institute for Global Affairs, a nonprofit at the Eurasia Group, raised the question: “For each group, how much do you trust that they act in the best interest of average Americans?”

Overall, Americans trusted the military at a 49 percent “net trust percentage.” They trust ICE at a negative 11 percent rate, and Congress ranks lowest at negative 32 percent.

The party breakdown for the answer is also revealing. Democrats have a negative 67 percent view of ICE, while Republicans have a 61 percent favorability of the agency. Independents were at negative 23.

This comes as the oldest Congress in history leads the country through an affordability crisis that has seen countless Americans, young and old, feel like they have no chance at achieving a better quality of life than their parents.

These numbers are particularly alarming given just how immensely unpopular ICE is, as federal agents descend upon communities and literally pull families apart to meet deportation quotas.

Read the full report from the Institute for Global Affairs here.

A group of Border Patrol agents decided to play tourists in Chicago and mock a neighborhood they hit with tear gas, and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is not having it.

Pritzker called out the federal agents on X for posing for a photo early Monday morning in front of The Bean, an art installation in the Windy City’s Millenium Park, and shouting, “Everyone say, ‘Little Village!’” The agents were referring to a Mexican-American neighborhood six miles away that federal immigration authorities have repeatedly targeted in raids.

Over the weekend, the agents used tear gas on one of Little Village’s streets, following an earlier tear-gassing incident in late October, despite a court order against using excessive force. Their bosses in the Department of Homeland Security claim the agents were shot at, although none of them were injured. The alderman who represents the area, Mike Rodriguez, said he was nearby and never heard any shots fired.

“It was a reign of terror,” Rodriguez said. Pritzker concurred.

“Making fun of our neighborhoods and communities is disgusting,” Pritzker posted Monday afternoon, linking to an article from local news outlet Block Club Chicago about the callous photo op. “Greg Bovino and his masked agents are not here to make Chicago safer. As children are tear gassed and U.S. citizens detained, they are posing for photo ops and producing reality TV moments.”

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose tactics have drawn criticism and judicial rebukes, was at the front of the group on Monday morning with some guard dogs, and told his fellow agents to “mask up” because the media was present. Bovino didn’t seem to care that the media heard his agents mocking Little Village, or joking about their heavy-handed tactics. As Pritzker said, these agents only care about themselves.

President Donald Trump’s administration is desperately hoping that the Supreme Court will give it a free pass on funding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits for this month.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer on Monday reiterated the Trump administration’s intention to ask the Supreme Court to intervene over District Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr.’s order requiring the government to pay full SNAP benefits for November.

After the Department of Justice leapt to challenge McConnell’s order last week, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued an administrative stay order Friday in order to give the court of appeals enough time to weigh in. On Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s motion to stay while it appealed the decision, triggering a 48-hour deadline on Jackson’s administrative stay. Her stay gave the government until Tuesday night to pay for SNAP in full, unless the Supreme Court decided to grant a longer stay.

In the filing Monday, Sauer said that the government intended to file a supplemental brief that afternoon, and he included “developments” to their application to the highest court in the land. He pointed to a federal judge in Boston who blocked a Department of Agriculture memo Sunday that ordered states to “immediately undo” steps to issue full benefits, though he did not say whether the government intended to challenge that order.

He also noted that the government shutdown, which had precipitated the funding lapse in the first place, might soon be coming to an end after a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers dropped their demand for Obamacare tax credits Sunday evening, in what some are calling a major betrayal to their party and the American people.

It was only a week ago Trump claimed it would be an “honor” to fund SNAP, should a court order him to do so. And it was the president’s own blatant unwillingness to follow through on that offer that signaled an “intent to defy” the judge’s order, prompting McConnell to demand the government pay up immediately.

Trump has repeatedly blamed the funding lapse on the shutdown, but with an end to the shutdown now on the horizon, it seems clear that Trump simply doesn’t want people to be able to buy food.